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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



THE KNACK OF IT 



The Knack of It 

SOME ESSAYS 
IN OPTIMISM 



By 
CHARLES BATTELL LOOMIS 




New 


To 


rk 


Chicago Toronto 


Fleming 


H. 


Revel I Company 


Land 


on 




and 


Edinburgh 



Copyright, 1906, 1907, 1908, by 
STREET & SMITH 

Copyright, 1908, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



LiSSARY of OONurtEiSsil 
Iwo Copies Heteiv^j* 

AUG 22 )^0Q 
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New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue 
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
London: 21 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 



To 

Mrs, Jerome K. Jerome 

In memory of a delightful 
summer at Gould's Grove 



Contents 




I 

To the Live Ones .... 


• 9 


II 

On Earning One's Salt 


. 14 


HI 
On Enthusiasm .... 


. 22 


IV 

Ihe Proper lime For Ill-Temper . 


31 


V 

On Keeping Young .... 


• 39 


VI 
On Generosity .... 


. 4S 


VII 
On Friendliness .... 


' 57 


VIII 
Express Yourself .... 


, 66 


IX 

On Renting One's Spleen 


. 73 


X 

Pass It Along 

[7] 


80 



C ontents 






XI 






On Housekeeping and Servant- 


keeping 


90 


XII 






Mixed Pickles , 


. 


. 100 


XIII 






The Heart of a Boy 


. 


. 108 


XIV 






On Revering Riches 


. 


. 117 


XV 






On the Golden Rule 




. 12^ 


XVI 






On Being Popular . 


• 


' 135 


XVII 






On Getting One's Money's 


Worth 


. 143 


XVIII 






A Word to Fathers 


. 


' ^53 


XIX 






Concerning Addition 


. 


' 159 


XX 






On Lending .... 


. 


167 


XXI 






On Getting Paid in One's Own Coin 


. 174 



[8] 



To the Live Ones 

AREN'T you glad you're here? 
Between you and me and the 
stump isn't the one trouble on 
earth the fact that there are too many de- 
lightful things to do, and not that the world 
is dull ? 

If you think the world is dull see a 
doctor. 

If you're not having a good time now, 
think of the good times you have had — 
revitalize them and you'll find that the 
juice is not all extracted. 

When the weather is fine that fact alone 
is worth living for. Just to breathe some- 
times is to be happy. If the weather is 
not up to the mark, get busy and you'll 
forget it. 

If you're a suburbanite think how much 
[9] 



The Knack of It 



better off you are than the cramped New 
Yorker, doomed to hang to straps, and cut 
off from the beauties of early spring, from 
canoeing and country walks and golf. 

If you're living in the city think how 
much better off you are than the poor 
suburbanite who has to go 'way out home 
after the theatre. Think of the free picture 
shows, the accessible concerts, the daily 
and nightly glitter and movement and in- 
terest of the New York parade. 

If you're living in the country think how 
much better off you are than either the 
city man or the suburbanite, with your 
freedom from excitement, your early hours, 
and your roomy environment. 

Just think of the interesting people there 
are in the world. If you really want to 
know them you can do it. And if by 
chance you are cut off from knowing them, 
think of the interesting ones who have 
written books in the last three thousand 

[lO] 



To the Live Ones 



years. Think of the unpainted pictures 
that are everywhere just waiting for you 
to compose them in your mind. 

Think of the unwritten comedies that 
are being enacted every day everywhere 
for your delectation ; on ferry-boat, in 
subway, on train and car and sidewalk, 
and in your own home and office. 

Think of the fun it is to study people's 
characteristics. And if you can turn the 
unpleasant thing of the moment into a 
joke for future laughter then are you 
happy indeed. 

Think of the people there are in the 
world who will not injure you if you do 
not injure them. Think of your wonder- 
ful immunity from harm if you mind your 
own business. And, then, go on, carry 
the thought a little further — think of the 
amount of good that people are ready to 
do you if you meet them half-way 
Hardly a man in the world but will do you 



The Knack of It 



a good turn if you approach him in the 
right way. And you need not be ashamed 
to let people do you a good turn because 
that's a kind of coin of which you may 
always have plenty to distribute yourself, 
and what you would do for another man 
you need make no bones of accepting 
from him. 

If you are a live one you won't spend 
your life doing the work that is uncon- 
genial to you. It's all very well to talk 
about doing the thing that comes to hand, 
but perhaps you have never tried doing 
the thing you can do best of all. Try 
doing it and you'll know what happiness 
is. You may not make as much, but 
you'll begin to live. 

Aren't you sorry for the dead ones ; the 
ones to whom music and sport and pic- 
tures and the landscape and their fellow 
beings mean nothing ; the ones who just 
doze along with half-closed nostrils and 

[12] 



To the Live Ones 



wide open mouths and sleepy eyes and 
torpid ears and livers ? If they don't live 
in this world how can they expect to en- 
joy living in heaven. 

Wake up. Be happy. With honey all 
around you if s your own fault if you ar- 
rive at the hive carrying nothing with you. 

Wake up. Try the happiness that re- 
sults from doing other people good. It's 
a form of joy that is open to all, and you 
can begin drawing on it to-day if you will. 

Wake up. Time is passing. How can 
you have happy memories if you do not 
give yourself up to being happy now. 

Wake up. Live. Be happy. Let us 
all be happy together. Hands all round. 
It's only a knack. 



[13] 



II 

On Earning Ones Salt 

ARE you useless? Are you really 
no good in the world? When 
you die will people say, "Well, 
there goes nothing " ? 

If you are, isn't it about time that you 
began to earn your salt ? Recollect that 
one can earn one's salt in many ways. 

Our friend, the miserly millionaire, does 
not earn his salt at all. He makes money 
— he may even be said to earn money, for 
he works hard enough in all conscience ; 
but is the mere accumulation of money 
earning one's salt ? 

To earn your salt is to pay your way by 
making some one else the happier by 
your presence, and this particular miserly 
millionaire of whom I speak makes no one 
happy — not even himself. 

[14] 



On Earning Ones Salt 

You may be out of a job and unable to 
obtain work and yet you can earn your 
salt, if you contribute to the sum of the 
world's happiness. 

This doesn't mean that it is right to 
lounge on a street corner and look cheer- 
ful. 

But if at the end of each day's unsuc- 
cessful yet conscientious search for work 
you cheer up the wife who naturally feels 
your position — or lack of position — more 
keenly than you do, you're not a drone ; 
you're entitled to whatever salt you get. 

The poor, starved inventor who was 
never able to obtain recognition for his in- 
ventions, but who laboured cheerfully on, 
putting his heart and soul and body into 
his work, and who finally died and was 
buried in a pauper's grave, was sneered at 
by the successful merchant of his village : 
" Old Jenniss was never worth a pinch of 
salt. Hadn't enough gumption to get a 

[15] 



The Knack of It 



square meal a week. Such people are 
useless. He's better off dead." 

If we believe in immortality, there are a 
good many of us who hope to be better 
off dead, but as old Jenniss was a ray of 
sunshine in spite of his disappointments 
and disasters (why, a group of capitalists 
were all ready to take up his automatic car- 
coupler when the Chicago fire wiped them 
out), and as he always firmly believed, 
even up to his last hour — he died of a 
paralytic stroke — that success was coming 
to him soon, he had a direct, though per- 
haps unconscious, stimulating effect on his 
neighbours. 

He was not a bad neighbour. When 
Harkness, the sneering merchant, pro- 
ceeded to foreclose the mortgage on 
Deacon Payson's house and farm — an act 
that would have sent the deacon and his 
bedridden wife out into the street — it was 
Jenniss who walked fifteen miles across 
[ i6 ] 



On Earning One s Salt 

country — there was no railroad within ten 
miles — to state the facts of the case to that 
warm-hearted and wealthy man, Adams 
Chaflee; and Jenniss, having proved by 
that act alone that he was worth his salt, 
Chaffee showed that he was entitled to all 
the salt he wanted by paying up interest 
and principal, and telling the old folks that 
they had earned the money by their 
beautiful lives. 

Some persons try to earn their salt by 
robbing the widows and fatherless, and 
then giving a tenth of the " loot " to other 
orphans and widows — in institutions. But 
a lifetime of such works wouldn't buy a 
bag of five-cent salt — it really wouldn't. 

But don't sit up with a self-satisfied grin 
and say, ** I know plenty of rich men who 
don't earn their salt." 

You are a poor man — do you earn it? 
Are you sure that I earn it ? I may do noth- 
ing but give advice at so much a word. 

[17] 



The Knack of It 



People who are called the salt of the 
earth have presumably earned their salt so 
many times over that they could pass for 
so many Lot's wives. 

It is again getting to be the fashion to 
read the Bible, so I feel that you understand 
my allusion. Five years ago, a person un- 
der twenty-five would have wanted to know 
who Lot was ; but we have changed all 
that. The Bible is now a piece of liter- 
ature, and every man, woman, and child 
who reads this knows it from cover to cover. 
(It was King David who said, " All men 
are liars.") 

** But if the salt hath lost it savour, 
wherewithal shall it be salted ? " 

One cannot earn one's salt for good and 
all by an isolated kindness. 

Even cows need salt every day — much 
more do humans, and you should see to it 
that your earning capacity grows with 
your growth. 

[18] 



On Earning Ones Salt 



If you are stupid — ask a candid friend 
whether you are or not — if you are stupid, 
you may still do your appointed task in a 
way to earn a certain amount of favour 
from your employers by your willingness 
to do more than is required of you. 

Salt for you then. 

Perhaps you are a maiden aunt in a sis- 
ter's house, and you feel that you lag su- 
perfluous. 

Stop feeling so. Do all you can for 
your nephews and nieces, and refrain from 
giving the usual advice of a maiden aunt, 
and much salt shall be added unto you. 

When you underpay your servant, and 
he gives you good satisfaction, in spite of 
his wages, think what salt he is laying up 
for himself. 

The thousand-dollar-man in the com- 
pany who does his work with a cheerful 
spirit, and with all the vim that is in him — 
when he meets the president of his com- 

[19] 



The Knack of It 



pany, face to face in the spirit land — will 
find that the angels think him just as much 
of a man, in spite of his ridiculously poor 
earning capacity on earth. 

No, the big salaried men canU earn their 
salt. 

I once knew a fellow of whom it was said 
that ** he wasn't worth the powder to blow 
him to Hades I " 

He hasn't been blown to Hades yet, and 
he may never compass the necessary pow- 
der, but to-day he is earning an honest 
living, and has made something of a name 
as a painter, while the fellow who made 
the remark, and who could only measure 
success by the yard-stick, earned his pow- 
der long ago — and took his departure. 

I'd like to be by when those two meet — 
on opposite shores. 

Don't worry about the other fellow's 
earning capacity, but see to it that when 
the Lord gives you each day your daily 

[20] 



On Earni?tg Ones Salt 

bread, you yourself provide the savour 
for it. 

Some people say, ** The world owes me 
a living," and they send out agents to col- 
lect the debt. But a better adage is, '' I 
owe the world a helpful life." 

You owe it to yourself to pay your 
brother what you owe him, and since every 
man is your brother, you owe something 
to every man with whom you come in con- 
tact. See that you pay the debt in the 
coinage of kindliness, good manners, high 
spirits — whatever kind of coin you can best 
lay your hands on — and then, no matter if 
your crops fail or your schemes go awry, 
or you '' get no orders," or you are only a 
poor, despised orphan in an institution, you 
will have earned your salt, and can hold 
up your head in any company whatsoever. 



[21] 



Ill 

On Enthusiasm 

ARE you enthusiastic? Do you 
voice your delight in a thing you 
Hke even to the point of extrava- 
gance ? 

Good I It's a good fault, believe me. 

They tell me that this world of ours is 
considerable of a success, and I thoroughly 
believe it. It is, in fact, a huge success, 
with all its faults — but I'll tell you some- 
thing that is no secret, and that is the fact 
that enthusiasm made this world a success. 

When Enthusiasm marries Perseverance, 
you may be sure that the name of their 
first-born will be Success. 

Enthusiasm is born in some people 
whom the fates have placed among those 
who think the outward expression of an 
inward joy bad form. These latter say 

[22] 



On Ent husiasm 



that to be in transports over such inevi- 
table and usual things as sunsets and pic- 
tures and friends and workmanship of all 
kinds is to show the lack of a critical spirit, 
but they are wrong. One may be enthu- 
siastic over the wrong thing beyond a 
doubt, but it is better, sometimes, to '* slop 
over " genuinely than to stand in unawed 
silence before a thing of beauty that 
should compel delighted expression. 

Enthusiasm has the measles-like habit of 
spreading until it inoculates a whole group. 

If some one hadn't been enthusiastic, we 
might still be using sailing vessels to reach 
Davy Jones' locker, and we might still be 
running people down with carriages in- 
stead of motor-cars. 

You take a town where there is no pub- 
lic spirit (which is related to enthusiasm), 
and let some one advocate the building of 
a new town hall to replace the dingy and 
drafty barn in which lecturers have caught 

[23] 



The Knack of It 



pneumonia from time immemorial, and, 
one after another, the townspeople will 
say : " Oh, what's the use? Probably we 
wouldn't like it when we got it." '* No 
doubt they^d put up a monstrosity." 
"Want to spend the people's money, do 
they ? Well, I'm against it." 

So it'll go, and the ramshackle hacks 
will continue to dump you at the cheerless 
old barn, and no one will enjoy any lec- 
tures or anything else that is given in the 
place, and the town will eventually die of 
dry-rot and blow away. 

But let one man of force and enthusiasm 
setde in that town, and let him tell the 
people how they put up a town hall in Q, 
and that it was the beginning of a new era 
in good architecture, and that it started a 
gentle litde boom that has been developing 
the town ever since ; let him go around in 
season and out of season (but not too much 
out of season) and advocate various im- 

[24] 



On Enthusiasm 



provements that will serve to put the town 
in the place where she belongs in the 
county, and after a while people will catch 
some of his enthusiasm, and a village im- 
provement society will be formed, and 
women will wake up and borrow a little of 
his enthusiasm, and blow on it until it 
flames up and kindles blazes in every 
heart, and in a few years when you go to 
that place to lecture or to visit you won't 
know the spruce little town that has taken 
the place of the sleepy back-number of a 
village. 

Enthusiasm built this world and swung 
it into motion in the universe. Yes, and 
enthusiasm lit all the stars, and gave them 
the push that has kept them going ever 
since. 

Depend upon it, whether you believe all 
there is to believe or not, that the verse in 
Genesis which says, ** And God looked 
upon the earth, and it was good," means a 

[25] 



The Knack of It 



lot. It means that enthusiasm antedated 
the paleozoic age. God set the fashion 
for enthusiasm, and it ill becomes feeble- 
blooded folk to decry it. 

There is good enthusiasm and there is 
bad enthusiasm, but both lead to " suc- 
cess." Both kinds, I repeat, lead to 
** success." 

Picture a bunco-steerer who met a 
farmer on Forty-second Street and said to 
him in a lackadaisical w^ay : " I don't 
believe you're John Perkins, of Stub Hol- 
low." 

The farmer would be apt to say : " I 
don't believe it, either, and if you'll excuse 
me, I'll be going on, for I notice there's 
consid'able to see, and I on'y brought two 
eyes along with me." And then he would 
leave the spiritless bunco-steerer, who 
would walk away disconsolate and say to 
himself : " Why did my parents make 
me take up bunco-steering, when I 

[26] 



On Enthusiasm 



haven't the slightest aptitude for it, and 
don't like it, and don't believe in it? I 
think it's positively immoral, and if I had 
my life to live over again, I'd try to do 
something I liked instead of trying to do 
people I don't care for, and wouldn't care 
if I never met again." 

But take the enthusiastic bunco-steerer, 
the man who really loves his work. How 
his eyes sparkle as he sees James Petti- 
bone walking along Cortlandt Street, 
looking at the sky-scrapers. 

" Well, well, I miss my guess if this 
isn't " and then he stops and stam- 
mers, and says jovially and with great 
bonhomie: ''There I am again — folk's 
names simply won't come to my tongue. 
I know you just as well as I know Zed 
Mason, of Peapack, but I never can get 
your name when I want it." 

All this time he is pumping James' hand 
with the greatest zest, and James, being of 

[27] 



The Knack of It: 



a kindly nature, is all aglow that some 
one in the great city of New York should 
know him. Probably some of the summer 
folk that boarded at brother Eli's. And, 
looking out of his innocent blue eyes into 
the equally guileless blue eyes of the mas- 
ter bunco-steerer, he says : ** James Petti- 
bone is my name, and I suppose you was 
up to Eli's last summer. Brother Eli had 
his house crammed, didn't he? " 

** He certainly did, and as long as that 
wife of his '^ 

Here a slight pause, to ascertain 
whether a wife is allowable under the cir- 
cumstances. Seeing no token of surprise 
in Mr. Pettibone's face, he goes on en- 
thusiastically : " As long as that wife of 
his keeps on cooking such good things, so 
long he'll have a house full of boarders 
every summer. Now I want you to let me 
show you around the town. I didn't see 
much of you up in the country, but you're 

[28] 



On Enthusiasm 



Eli's brother, and that's enough for a New 
Yorker, born and bred like me. We New 
Yorkers are noted for our hospitality, and 
when we can do for strangers, we do 
it. My wife will be tickled to death to see 
you, and on our way I want to take you 
to seethe most remarkable chance " 

Well, you know the rest. Good old 
James' heart is beating fast, and it won't 
be long before he will part with his money 
in one of the well-established ways set 
apart by bunco-men for the separating of 
green hands and greenbacks. And en- 
thusiasm did the trick. 

I am not advocating the establishment 
of night-schools for the study of en- 
thusiastic bunco-steering, but I'm trying to 
show what a power enthusiasm is. 

You write a book, and you think that 
salesmen and advertising sell it. But the 
thing that sells it is enthusiasm on the 
part of its readers. If they like it so much 

[29] 



The Knack of If 



that it sets their tongues wagging in its 
favour, why, it's you who are the candi- 
date for the fat royalty accounts. 

Enthusiasm warms the cockles of the 
struggler's heart when you praise his 
work. And enthusiasm never belittles. 

If you are enthusiastic, if you give way 
to sincere enthusiasms, though people may 
laugh gently at your effervescence, they 
will love you in the long run. 

Therefore, with all thy getting, get en- 
thusiasm. 



[30] 



IV 

The Proper Time for Ill-Temper 

I KNOW a man who is only unpleasant 
three or four hours out of his whole 
waking day. He is almost every- 
where spoken of as " that genial Bob 
Sanders." 

He is affable to the brakeman on the 
suburban train ; pleasant to the deck-hands 
and car-conductors with whom he is 
brought in contact ; agreeable to his 
clerks ; always has a cheery smile for the 
old woman who sells papers at the ferry- 
house ; and when he is with his business 
friends at lunch he is the soul of good fel- 
lowship. 

He really does a good deal of good in 
the world. The newswoman relishes his 
smile ; the deck-hands always pass the 
time of day with him ; the brakemen go 

[31] 



T h e Kn ack of It 



out of their way to open an obstinate car- 
window for him ; his clerks are better work- 
men because of his human way with them, 
and his companions at lunch or at a public 
dinner are all enabled to be better men just 
because Bob Sanders spreads sunshine. 

From the time he boards his train in the 
morning until he comes home late and 
tired he is a model citizen. 

What wonder, then, if for the remaining 
two or three hours he is cross and fretful 
and nervous ? A man has to have a let- 
down some time, and as Sanders has only 
three children — two boys and a girl — and 
but one wife (and she's a very little one), 
there are not many in the world who suffer 
by his acidity of temper. 

Now, just suppose for a minute that 
he pretended to be amiable and long-suf- 
fering and jolly with his wife and children, 
and then went out into the world and 
vented his real feelings on his clerks and 
[32] 



The Proper Time for III- Temper 

the brakemen and the deck-hands ; scowl- 
ing at the old newswoman, and surly and 
sour to his business acquaintances and 
luncheon associates. What sort of reputa- 
tion do you suppose he would have, and 
what sort of good would he do in the 
world ? 

Does irritability get the best work out of 
clerks? Do fussy passengers inspire train 
hands with a desire to serve them ? Are 
grumpy men popular at a lunch-club or a 
public dinner? 

Why, of course not. If Sanders saved 
his urbanity for his family and were cross 
in public, there's not a person who would 
call him " genial Bob," and his influence in 
the world at large would be a distinctly 
bad one. 

Depend upon it, my dear friends, if 

you're going in for a reputation for whole- 

souledness, the family is a very small field 

of endeavour, and it yields little publicity. 

[33] 



The Knack of It 



Of course, if you have kindliness enough 
to last you from sun-up to bedtime, and can 
begin the day by being a human sunbeam 
in the family circle, irradiate cockle-warm- 
ing friendliness on the train and ferry-boat, 
make the old woman at the ferry-gates 
feel that she has at least one friend if she 
should ever want to borrow as much as a 
quarter, fill your clerks with an insatiable 
desire to serve your interests to the best of 
their ability, and let mirth and jollity loose 
at the lunch -table ; and can then go home 
and make your family happier for your 
presence — why, I want to say to you that 
if they got up a parade of such men as 
you, and President Roosevelt were to start 
reviewing it at eleven o'clock, he wouldn't 
be late to lunch. 

Just imagine the great American public 
foisting its home manners on the outside 
world I Why, life in the streets would be 
unsafe — it really would. 
[34] 



The Proper Time for III- Temper 

Here's our friend Mr. Allen, who has 
just been through a whirlwind experience 
at home, trying to catch his morning train. 
His wife is sitting on a hall chair gasping 
with the consequent fatigue ; his children 
have gone snarling to school, following his 
home example. 

Now, let us suppose that Mr. Brown, 
who has been through a similar experience 
in his own home, and whose wife is pant- 
ing in the pantry, and his children are 
quarrelling off to school, were to greet Mr. 
Allen pleasantly and say, '* It's going to be 
a hot day," and Mr. Allen were to say in 
reply, " Confound you I don't you see I'm 
reading my paper?" what sort of man 
would Brown think Allen ? 

Or if Allen said to the newswoman, 
** Here, get out of my way. You're block- 
ing the passage. Women like you ought 
to be indicted as nuisances," would the 
world be any better for his presence ? 

[35] 



The Knack of It 



If hot words must be said, let them be 
said in the sanctity of the home. Let us 
at any cost preserve our pubhc reputations 
for suavity and patience. Even as it is, 
there is a good deal of bad blood shown 
in public. 

A thought has just struck me : Are 
those irascible business men who vent their 
spleen on clerks and conductors and their 
business associates, men who, having only 
a small stock of good temper, save it for 
use at home ? 

It may be so. Fancy, then, what a 
shock it must be to Mrs. Smith, who 
adores her husband as the most even-tem- 
pered man in the world, when she happens 
in at his office and finds him cursing the 
clerks and spreading bad manners every- 
where. Shocks like that are not good 
for a woman. Better far for Mr. Smith 
to mix his good and bad temper to- 
gether, and evenly distribute the result 

[36] 



The Proper Time for Ill-Temper 

on clerk and child, workman and wife 
alike. 

A friend, who sometimes watches me as 
I press the keys, and who can read my ar- 
ticles on the keyboard in the act of being 
set down on paper, says that I am in a 
cynical and unpleasant mood, and she's glad 
she wasn't one of my family this morning. 

Now, there she wrongs me, because I 
woke up feeling just as amiable as I could, 
and if the children had only appreciated 
how amiable I was, all would have been 
well, in spite of the awful heat, and this ar- 
ticle would have turned out to be some- 
thing to make people forget their troubles 
(even while I was remembering my own 
just as hard as I could), but it was hot, and 
they were cross, and I said things that I 
regretted before I had given utterance to 
'em, but just couldn't help letting 'em fly, 
and they answered back, and we had a lit- 
tle give and take that showed them lack- 

[37] 



The Knack of It 



ing in paternal reverence and me lacking 
in parental reserve. 

Then I went out for a walk, met some 
neighbours, and was so amiable that I 
overheard one of them say as I left, ** I 
wonder if he ever is cross," which puffed 
me up considerable, even in the face of 
what I had said at home. 

Oh, I tell you we are a queer lot, those 
of us who are people. I dare say that 
some of us won't become perfect for sev- 
eral months. 

But, at any rate, I am going to show my 
real side to the public and be amiable — 
and if I'm cross at home, why, that's only 
a little veneer that I put on for the occa- 
sion. 

It's the basic wood underneath that 
really counts, you know. Veneers are 
generally taken at their true value. 



[38] 



On Keeping Young 

DO you say every morning when 
you get up, " I am still young " ? 
It will be worth your while to do 
it, my friend. A man is not the frame- 
work that holds in place his clothes. To 
reverse it, the framework that holds in 
place his clothes is not the real man. 
That framework does age, there's no 
doubt of it. Its joints creak, the muscles 
grow flabby, the legs and arms grow re- 
bellious and refuse to move as fast as they 
used to move, the eye gets tired of seeing 
things clearly and sees things **as in a 
glass, darkly." 

But don't we all know that a man's 
clothes-horse, so to speak, is not the man 
himself ? The real man is that something 
that no one has ever been able to see or 

[39] 



The Knack of It 



to put his hand upon, that something 
that Hves forever. And does immortality 
age? 

The stars are to all intents and purposes 
immortal, but have you noticed any per- 
ceptible diminution of their brilliance since, 
well, since we became the greatest nation 
that the sun ever shone upon ? 

We — our spirits — are immortal and for 
us to age is for us to commit an un- 
pardonable folly. 

Don't look at your face in a glass and 
ask yourself, ** Am I getting old ? " 
Look at your spirit in the glass of your 
friend's treatment of you and try to dis- 
cover whether it is getting old. And if it 
is — drop ten years. 

It will not be so hard as it seems. 
Think young thoughts. Keep your mind 
wide open to the reception of new ideas. 
Don't, when you get to be forty, say to 
yourself, ** I'm one of the has-beens." 

[40] 



On Keeping Young 

Only forty years old ! Why, you ought 
to be a colt at forty. 

Take, for instance, Manuel Garcia. I 
don't mean the Cuban patriot, but the 
Manuel Garcia who over eighty years ago 
brought to America the first Italian opera 
company. 

I say, take, for instance, Manuel Garcia. 
The young man died recently at the age 
of one hundred and two. 

They gave a dinner to our young friend, 
Manuel, when he was a hundred, and he 
made a speech full of wit ; a speech that 
showed that he did not consider one 
hundred years half as heavy a load as 
some undergraduates esteem their twenty- 
one years. 

If Manuel Garcia was still alive and 
busy at one hundred and two, and if, in 
our own country, Charles Haynes Haswell 
(born in the same year as Lincoln and 
Mendelssohn and Gladstone and Holmes 

[41] 



The Knack of It 



and Edgar Allan Poe) the mechanical 
engineer, at ninety-seven still went to his 
office on Broadway every day, buoyant 
and blithe, who has a right to establish a 
" dead-line " at forty and push you over it 
and say, " By-by, old man. Glad to have 
met you. Hope you'll be happy among 
the used-to-wases " ? 

You can't shove me over that way, and 
I've forgotten just when / was forty. 

Why, for all I know, I have sixty years 
before me. And if a man has sixty years 
to come, what are forty odd that have 
go7ie? Nothing. A mere fortnight's 
holiday in the country. 

Don't you let these beardless fellows—- 
oh, dear, I forgot ; we're all of us beard- 
less now since the winds blew our 
whiskers away — but don't let the young- 
sters tell you when you're to get old. 

They tell of a youth of one hundred and 
seven, in San Francisco, who was met just 

[42] 



On Keeping Young 

after ** the fire " and who was asked how 
he had fared. 

'' Lost everything. Got to begin life 
over again," said he jauntily. 

That's the stuff ! He was the quintes- 
sence of the spirit that is going to make 
the new San Francisco the wonder of the 
world. 

Do you suppose that that forty line 
counts for anything out there? No, my 
Christian — or heathen — friend, it does not. 
They are all young men and women to- 
gether over there. And they are going to 
build the City of Youth out there by the 
waters of the Pacific. 

It is almost too soon to say it now, but 
the time will come when San Francisco 
will look on her disaster as a great bless- 
ing. 

Why? Because it was the touchstone 
that showed her citizens what stuff was in 
them. They have agreed to stop believing 
[43] 



The Knack of It 



in old age ; and the septuagenarian painter 
whose landscapes — the glory of the coast 
States — were destroyed by fire and who 
wrote a friend in the East who had con- 
doled with him, ** I am going to paint bet- 
ter pictures than ever," and the octogen- 
arian whose hotel was blown up to stop 
the progress of the flames and who, being 
in New York at the time, went back at 
once to render aid to those worse off than 
himself, and the young man who lost his 
job as a clerk and found another as a city 
builder are all working together, shoulder 
to shoulder. 

The earthquake stopped the supply of 
water in the great mains, but it let loose 
the fountain of youth that was formerly 
supposed to be in Florida, and men, 
women, and children are drinking of it 
eagerly. 

Read the private letters that some of 
your friends or you yourselves must have 
[44] 



On Keeping Young 

received from those living in San Francisco 
when the shock came. But one spirit 
breathes from them all. It is not a vain 
cry of ** Time is flying " that we find in 
those letters, but *' There is yet time. 
We're starting afresh — to-day ! " 

And starting afresh is only another way 
of saying, " We are young." 

Keep young, then, you of the East, and 
the South, and the North. Let San Fran- 
cisco's quake shake out of you the feeling 
of old age that was creeping into your 
senses. 

To be sure, there are sky-rockets of 
twenty-five and thirty that rise brilliantly, 
but they may be spent sticks in a few years. 
Let your flame of life burn steadily, and 
replenish it from time to time with young 
thoughts — Young's '' Night Thoughts " 
would help — and you'll be as young at 
fifty and sixty as you were at forty or thirty 
or twenty — no, you were old at twenty ; 
[45] 



The Knack of It 



older than you'll ever be again — and you'll 
force these arrant young masters of three 
decades or less to move the dead-line 
farther on, or perhaps relegate it to the 
limbo of useless things. 

Why should there be a dead-line until 
you are lying prone and your friends have 
neglected to i* omit flowers " ? 

A man once told me that when he was a 
boy he knew a very old man who died and 
was buried. Years afterwards while walk- 
ing through the cemetery, he came on this 
old man's tomb, and just for curiosity, 
looked to see how old he was when he 
died. 

" And, sir, he was only forty-two and I 
was forty-five the day I looked, and I felt 
as young as I ever did. I suppose the 
youngsters think I'm old, but they're mis- 
taken." 

If disease spares you, youth lies in your 
own hands. 

[46] 



On Keeping Young 

What is the secret? Kindly thoughts, 
good cheer, and the feeUng that you have 
not robbed another man in getting what 
you need. Of course, if you have failed to 
see that other people have rights and have 
simply played the fascinating, but wicked, 
game of ** grab," you'll grow old so fast 
that people will forget that you ever were 
young. 

They say a woman's as old as she looks, 
but a man is as old as he feels. 

Make it your pleasure to feel as young 
as you can, and induce your wife to do the 
same — for I don't believe the ungallant 
first clause of the aphorism — and you'll get 
so young that your son will call you ** my 
boy," and you'll call him " old chap." 

And a nation of "young men" is un- 
conquerable. 



[47] 



VI 

On Generosity 

ARE you generous ? I say " you," 
but I don't mean the person who 
happens to be reading these words 
any more than I mean to be thinking of 
my own generosity or meanness. By 
*'you" I mean every one but the person 
who happens to be reading this. 

Are you people who constitute the pub- 
lic generous ? 

Some man who didn't give a cent or a 
thing when the call came from San Fran- 
cisco inflates his chest and says : ** Yes, 
look what we Americans did for the suffer- 
ers by the earthquake and fire." 

And he's honestly proud of their gener- 
osity. There are lots of people who are 
proud of the generosity of their fellows, 
but when they are called upon to be gen- 

[48] 



On Generosity 



erous personally they say : " Oh, what's 
the use of my doing anything? Fm only 
one person. I have heavy theatre and sup- 
per bills. It isn't up to me to hand any- 
thing out for this affair. But I wish you 
success. We Americans are a generous 
lot, and I know you'll meet with a hearty 
response from men better able to give 
than I." 

But it's not only the giving of money 
that makes a man generous. Here's John 
Marchbanks, who made his money in 
** pure leaf lard " (*' Bubbly Creek Brand," 
with a picture on each box of a rippling 
stream bubbling over pebbles out in the 
country, and clean little pigs coming down 
to drink). 

He gave ten thousand dollars to the San 
Franciscans. That is, he asked his secre- 
tary to make out a check for the amount. 
He personally did not lift a finger or give 
the matter a second thought. A mental 
[49] 



The Knack of It 



picture of their desolate condition was not 
in his busy brain at all. 

They say his income is ten thousand dol- 
lars a pleasant day — and just as much on 
unpleasant ones. 

George Parsons, of the same church as 
that attended by John Marchbanks, did not 
give a single, solitary cent. 

And yet — why can't John Marchbanks be 
as generous as George Parsons is ? 

For, although Parsons couldn't and 
didn't give a cent of money, he gave two 
suits of clothes (and he has only three) and 
so many shirts and other articles of under- 
wear that his wife says she doesn't see how 
he's going to get along next winter. 

The papers had editorials about John 
Marchbanks' generosity, but I searched in 
vain for any reference to the generosity of 
George Parsons. 

Some people seem to think that ten 
thousand dollars is always a generous sum. 

[50] 



On Generosity 



If you have ten thousand dollars and give 
ten thousand dollars it's magnificent — it is 
also unbelievable. 

To Marchbanks, the giving of ten thou- 
sand dollars represents a day's income and 
a request to his secretary. Marchbanks 
himself is not put to the least bit of trouble, 
and he spends his morning playing golf, 
while Parsons goes canvassing among 
his friends for enough clothes to make up 
a large box, and gives up a whole day to 
it — in a busy season. 

Of course, there are rich men who are 
generous by any standards except those of 
the widow's mite. No rich man (who gets 
his name in the papers) has ever been as gen- 
erous as she was. There have been those 
who have said that to die rich was to die dis- 
graced, and yet have gone on courting dis- 
grace in four-in-hand, steamer, and rail- 
road-train. 

Give yourself to your children. To most 

[51] 



The Knack of li 



mothers, such advice is unnecessary. 
They are generosity itself in their attitude 
towards their children, but we men are apt 
to think children a necessary (and rather 
lovable) nuisance, and beyond toiling for 
their keep in a somewhat mechanical way, 
we give them little. 

Give them some of your spare time. It 
may keep you out of mischief. 

Be generous to the servants within your 
gates. I don't mean pay them wages that 
will seriously pinch you, but after you 
have agreed upon a just wage, see to it 
that you deal with them generously — that 
your wife makes their rooms attractive ; 
that they have something to read after 
their work is done. And be generous of 
praise if their work pleases you. 

Do you know who are more generous 
than city people ? 

Country people are more generous. 

There is more real fellowship in a small 

[52] 



On Generosity 



farming community than there is in a fairly- 
large city. 

Farmers are not usually generous with 
money. Some of them rarely handle actual 
cash, their trading being in the nature of 
produce for necessities. They help each 
other, though. If Brown, who is poor, falls 
sick and has no " women folks " to look 
after him, perhaps Burke-Hastings, who 
summers in the country and who is a 
kindly man, sends a trained nurse to him. 

But summer people are not always 
thoughtful of the needs of country folk, 
and it may be that there are no summer 
people in the section in which Brown lives. 
I have known farmers, in such a case, to 
alternate in sitting up' with Brown, while 
their wives saw to it that he had ministra- 
tions and tempting food. 

The comic papers have held up the hard- 
fisted, close-fingered farmer to ridicule for 
so long that to a great many otherwise in- 
[53] 



The Knack of It 



telligent people " farmer " means a stingy- 
man ; but a large proportion of the food 
and clothing that went to San Francisco 
in her time of need, went direct from farm- 
ers and their good wives. 

Teach your children to be generous. If 
they seem to be grasping and selfish, try 
to reshape their characters just as you 
would try to make them speak melodiously 
if, by a rare chance, they had nasal or rasp- 
ing voices. Thanks to your efforts, there 
are now no unpleasant voices in the com- 
ing generation. See to it that there are no 
children who are mean. 

Some of you are generous already — gen- 
erous of advice. That is a form of gener- 
osity that is never appreciated at its full 
value. I have given people advice that I 
simply wouldn't have taken from another, 
even if I had been starving for advice. 
And oftentimes those to whom I gave it 
have gone away without it. Sometimes 
[54] 



On Generosity 



thinking that they have forgotten it, I have 
gone after them with it — to learn that their 
neglect of it was intentional — that they did 
not care to take it. 

I have a friend who is most generous 
with advice — he is always giving it to me 
— the very kind he needs himself, and I 
will not allow him to rob himself, and I re- 
fuse to take it. It's easy to be generous 
with advice, but if you take my advice you 
won't ever give it. 

But if any of you need my well-meant 
remarks in regard to generosity, take them 
to yourselves without a thought of me. In 
fact, I'd rather you would not think of me 
in this connection at all. I may have a 
totally different conception of generosity 
from what you have. 

I'll be content if these words of mine 
make the people of this country even half 
as generous again as they are. 

For we are known the world over for be- 
[55] 



The Knack of It 



ing generous, and our millionaires got the 
suggestion of generosity from the plain 
people, who, man for man, are more gen- 
erous than they. 

The printer has suggested that if I am a 
niggard of words on this page it will leave 
too much white paper showing, and so just 
to avoid the suspicion of being ungenerous 
I add a few words that will do little else 
than fill up. There is really food for an 
article in this thought, but I have about 
come to the end of my tether and can say 
no more. 

Meanwhile, let us give three cheers for 
the widow and her mite. 



[56] 



VII 

On Friendliness 

FRIENDLINESS is not the most 
unprofitable grace to cultivate. 
Friendliness sometimes goes farther 
than expensive car-springs or elaborate 
menus or comfortable beds in making 
travel a pleasant thing, and it can even be 
practiced in the home circle and the busi- 
ness office and pay a pretty good percent- 
age of profit on the amount invested. 

You yourself feel drawn towards that 
friendly child — the one who answers pleas- 
antly when you speak to him in passing. 
And as you feel concerning him other folk 
will feel in regard to you if you give out 
some of your natural warmth. 

One of the queer things about genuine 
friendliness is the way in which it meets 
with the very same attribute in persons of 
the most diverse temperaments. 

[57] 



The Knack of It 



Once there were three persons making 
a tour of the United States. Their way 
led them through the portals of some of the 
rankest as well as some of the most luxu- 
rious hotels in the country, and^they met 
some of the most disagreeable experiences 
as well as some of the most charming 
people. There were manifold discomforts 
of railway travel ; there were departures at 
chilly and sunless hours in the early morn- 
ing, and arrivals at drizzly and freezing 
hours in the late night ; there were meals 
to be eaten that surely could never have 
been intended for consumption by civilized 
beings ; and in spite of many, many hours 
of delight and pleasure there were many 
hours of dreary discomfort. 

One of the party was an English lady, 
and she left the shores of England with the 
most friendly feelings for Americans as a 
race, and for those people with whom she 
was to come in contact in particular. 

[58] 



On Friendliness 



Friendliness is not dutiable, and she was 
allowed to bring in her entire stock without 
question, and just as soon as she set foot 
on terra firma (as I can testify of my own 
knowledge) she began to irradiate it and 
with as imperceptible a diminution of it as 
that observed in radium. 

Gruff reporters who were used to getting 
what they were sent for with scant regard 
for manners, as well as those of the more 
gallant kind, felt bound to add to this 
woman's stock, of which she had so great 
a supply, and they offered to make her 
way easier just as the passengers on the 
voyage had gone out of their way to add 
to her comfort. 

She had not gone many hundred miles 
before she had made several discoveries — 
American men were the most courteous 
and the most obliging she had ever met ; 
American women were so agreeable when 
travelling ; American children were so re- 

[59] 



The Knack of It 



markably well-behaved on trains and in 
hotels ; and American dogs were the friend- 
liest creatures imaginable. 

There was not a chambermaid, white or 
black, who came in contact with this little 
Englishwoman who did not express a wish 
to go back to England and live with her. 
The stories of their lives that she carried 
with her were many, curious, and various. 

Fretful babies in railway-stations waiting 
for snowed-up trains forgot their worries in 
looking at the wonderful ornaments at- 
tached to her chatelaine, and stray dogs 
came up to be petted and to hear stories 
of the little fox-terrier she had left be- 
hind. 

Nor was it blarney that caused her to 
express her belief in the universal friendli- 
ness of the Americans. She wished every- 
body well, and the knowledge of that wish 
shining through her pleasant countenance 
caused everybody to wish her well, and 

[60] 



On Friendliness 



society was on its best behaviour when she 
was around. 

Fifteen thousand miles were travelled 
before she set foot on the steamer that was 
to take her back to her native land, and in 
all that time I never heard her utter a 
serious complaint. In the worst hotel I 
ever entered (the best one in the town), 
where the food was so uninviting and void 
of nourishment that I bought a half-dozen 
fresh eggs at a grocer's in order to stave 
oil starvation, she thought the vinegar the 
best she had ever tasted. " It had quite a 
bouquet." It was good vinegar, but I 
don't think the proprietor will ever build 
up any great business on vinegar alone. 

Even he, although he knew no more 
about making people comfortable than a 
porcupine hung up by the hind legs, was 
friendly to the little Englishwoman and 
hoped she was well pleased. Pathetic 
hope! 

[6i] 



The Knack of It 



When we were luxuriating at a perfect 
hotel amid the orange-groves of southern 
California we could laugh at the "best 
vinegar " of the Dakota hostelry, but we 
never laughed at the friendliness of our 
companion. 

She received attentions on every hand 
from people who had no idea who she 
was, and all by virtue of her genuine 
friendliness. 

Friendliness is a species of magic. 
Take a little of it — being careful to shake 
all condescension out of it — when you go 
prowling in the poorer quarters of any 
large city you may visit in the course of 
your travels. You'll add to the stock of 
friendliness in that quarter, and yet you'll 
come back with your supply undimin- 
ished. 

Why do travellers think English police- 
men the best specimens of their kind? 
Because they are so friendly. They thaw 

[62] 



On Friendliness 



us out. English reserve would be extinct 
if it depended upon the London ** bob- 
bies " to keep up the supply. They are 
seemingly on the street solely to set you 
right and to make your going and coming 
pleasant ; and after you have asked the 
way of half a dozen of them you get a stock 
of good nature that lasts the rest of the day. 

Don't blame the little chap who doesn't 
answer when you pass the time of day 
with him. Follow him home and ask his 
parents to make him responsive. You'll 
have to exercise a good deal of tact in do- 
ing this and you may get into a scrap, but 
if it teaches the boy to be friendly it will 
be worth your while. 

But don't let your friendliness degen- 
erate into mealy-mouthedness. The hus- 
band of the English lady was also 
friendly, and travelling with him was a 
pleasure, but he once gave me advice that 
I will never forget. " If you have suffered 

[63] 



The Knack of It 



a wrong that needs righting, see to it that 
you get angry before the other fellow does. 
It will give you an advantage over him." 

This he exemplified when through the 
stupidity of a gateman we had lost a train 
for Chicago from Indianapolis. There 
happened to be another train for Chicago 
on another road just about to pull out 
from the Union Station. 

Quick as a flash my Englishman flew 
into a furious rage and had two or three 
officials looking into the matter as to why 
we had lost our train. He also demanded 
new tickets for us over the other line — and 
he got them just in time for us to jump 
aboard the train and move smoothly on 
our way to Chicago. 

Then breaking into a genial smile, he 
said to me : *' Always get angry first. 
They might have made us think it was our 
fault if I hadn't stormed a bit." 

That was a case where friendliness 

[64] 



On Friendliness 



might have worked the same result, but in 
the opinion of the EngHshman there was 
no time for it. He needed Chicago in a 
hurry, and he got it by stormy word of 
mouth. Through it all the friendly little 
woman looked distressed, and hoped when 
it was all over that no one would lose his job. 

Don't make a pose of friendliness. If 
you're friendly for what it will bring you 
and not because your heart prompts your 
feeling the plate of your friendliness will 
soon wear away in spots, and people will 
see your real nature through the gaps. 

Some one has said that kind words but- 
ter no parsnips, but there is no doubt that 
he was wrong whoever he was. Kind 
words with the unmistakable ring of sin- 
cerity in them not only butter parsnips, but 
they often buy parsnips, and the best grade 
of parsnips ; while a chip on the shoulder 
is the worst kind of epaulet and a constant 
expense to the wearer. 
[65] 



VIII 

Express Yourself 

BRETHREN, the thought that I wish 
to expand this lovely April morn- 
ing — it won't be April when you 
read this, but it is April in her sunniest 
mood now, with mocking-birds singing 
and buzzards lazily sailing through the 
soft air, and North Carolina darkies going 
to work or shirking work, according to 
their several dispositions. 

Let me see, where was I when I lost my 
thread ? Oh, yes I the thought upon which 
I wish to enlarge is this : express yourself. 
Get into the habit of expressing yourself. 

What is public opinion ? It is the con- 
census of popular expression. How are 
we to get at public opinion on any given 
subject if each man, each woman, declines 
to give his or her opinion ? 
[66] 



Express Yourself 

You want some law passed. What do 
you do? Nine times out of ten you do 
nothing. The thing to do is to write to 
your congressman. Never mind if you are 
shaky on punctuation, or if your spelling 
is poor — write your letter : free your mind, 
and you will have become a better citizen. 

An artist draws an illustration that really 
illustrates a story. You like his work ; it 
gives you distinct pleasure. Return the 
pleasure to him. Express yourself. Tell 
him how much you like his illustration. 
He may not answer your letter, but you 
may rest assured that he will enjoy read- 
ing it, and will do better work because 
of it. 

A negro is burned to death in the South 
by a lawless mob. 

Be sure to express yourself in vigorous 
English to the editor of your home paper. 
Never mind whether you live in California, 
or Massachusetts, or Minnesota, or Vir- 

[67] 



The Knack of It 



ginia. You are an American, and every 
negro tortured to death by a mob causes 
us Americans to sink in the estimation of 
the world. 

I have talked with an intelligent Euro- 
pean who thought that respectable Ameri- 
cans countenanced the lynching of ne- 
groes ; and his reason for so thinking was 
just because there was not a tremendous 
expression of popular opinion denouncing 
such devilish barbarism. 

The next time a negro is lynched, see to 
it that you make it your duty to write 
burning words on' the subject. 

The crime of the negro is a terrible one, 
but the crime of the lynchers is equally ter- 
rible — and they are white. 

If all the men and women who read this 
article were to sit down to-day and express 
themselves from their hearts on the subject 
of lynching, the days of lynch-law would 
be numbered. And the better element 
[68] 



Express Yourself 

north and south would rejoice, for lynching 
is one of the awful, shameful blots on our 
civilization. If you remain silent, my 
friends, you are party to it. 

Express yourself. If your railroad crowds 
its passengers by putting on an insufficient 
number of cars, let each crowded passen- 
ger write a candid expression of opinion 
to the passenger agent. If your trolleys 
are crowded, don't lazily submit — express 
yourselves. Not to each other, but to the 
man who is running things. Make it hot 
for him. He is there to serve you. Don't 
be gentle sheep and bleat contentedly when 
you are herded together. Be goats, and 
butt in. 

Reforms are never anything but the fruit 
of a strong popular expression. 

If your children do well at school, or in 
music, or in drawing, express yourself as 
pleased. Don't let it go at being internally 
pleased, or telling your next-door neigh- 

[69] 



The Knack of It 



hour, who has children of her own, what 
remarkable children you have. Dollars to 
doughnuts, she won't believe they are half 
as remarkable as her own I Tell the chil- 
dren themselves. It won't do a bit of 
harm, but may act as a further stimulant. 

If a dead man could hear the pleasant 
things said about him, it would put new 
life into him. Put that new life into him 
while he is yet alive and at work. 

Do you like to have some one express 
an honest appreciation of your own work ? 
Yes? Well, do you suppose that other 
people are so very different from yourself? 
Express yourself to them. 

Don't be afraid to have opinions, and 
don't be afraid of expressing them. 

Emerson used to tell with relish that he 
loaned a copy of Plato to a Massachusetts 
farmer, and, on returning it, the man said : 
** Do you know, that feller has some 
thoughts like mine 1 " 

[70] 



Express Yourself 

Perhaps if you express your own thoughts 
they may turn out to be like Plato's ; and 
whereas comparatively few people know or 
care what Plato's thoughts were, the ex- 
pression of your own may eventually win 
for you a livelihood on account of the ap- 
preciation of your fellows. 

When you go away on a journey and 
leave loved ones behind, be sure to express 
yourself in letters to them. If they love 
statistics, tell them the populations of the 
towns and the number arrested for drunk- 
enness — if it's a prohibition State. The 
fact itself will be interesting, and thought- 
producing. 

If they like to hear about scenery, throw 
in a few trees and a hill or two, and put in 
a dash of colour. Tell them when the 
place was settled and how it came by its 
peculiar name and how much the oldest 
citizen would have been worth to-day if he 
had held onto his lots in the central portion 

[71] 



The Knack of It 



of the city instead of selling them for a cow 
that died the week after, and how they're ex- 
pecting some time to have a union station 
instead of the two very inconvenient ones 
that now disgrace the architecture of the 
city a mile apart. 

But, better still, tell them the incidents of 
travel that really interested you, and you 
will interest them. You may find that 
your letters are so much more entertaining 
than you are yourself that your relatives 
will insist upon your travelling still farther 
— and travel is educational. 

Don't be a sphinx. Express yourself. 



[72] 



IX 

On Venting One s Spleen 

I MET a man the other day who told 
me that when things got so that he 
couldn't stand them any longer, he 
went off by himself, down cellar preferably, 
and swore copiously until he felt better. 

Now, this would be a poor place in 
which to defend swearing, although what 
passed for swearing when some of us mid- 
dle-aged men were children turns out now 
to be nothing worse than bad form ; still, 
I could not help thinking that my friend 
vented his ill-feeling at the world in gen- 
eral very harmlessly. I have no doubt he 
did feel better when he had rid himself of 
a lot of strong words, and I have no doubt 
that along with the strong words escaped 
some of the bitterness that had set him 
" biling." 

[73] 



The Knack of It 



Fm not sure but that ** biling " means 
getting filled with bile, and when a man's 
** biling" he needs to get rid of the bile. 
, Venting one's spleen in a cellar is a 
form of blank-cartridge firing. It hurts no 
one, and yet the noise is there just as 
much as if you were loaded for b'ar. 

There's another form of harmless firing 
that relieves one's pent-up spirits wonder- 
fully. You have received an injury at the 
hands of some one, and you feel like going 
to him while the sense of injury is strongest, 
and telling him just what you think of him. 

There are occasions when that is the 
only manly thing to do, but there are also 
times when the injury is more fancied than 
real, and you are in too perturbed a state 
to be able to differentiate between a real 
and an imagined wrong. 

This is the thing to do : Take hasty 
strides to your writing-desk. Be sure that 
they are hasty. Jab your pen into the ink- 
[74] 



On Venting One s Spleen 

well so viciously that you break the nib. 
Take out the pen, inking your fingers in 
so doing, and adding fuel to your wrath 
against your enemy. Put in a new pen, 
jab again, but not hard enough to hurt the 
pen, and then pour out your soul in a let- 
ter to the offending one. Use sarcasm; 
apply vitriolic phrases that will make him 
writhe when he reads them ; employ in- 
vective, and wax diabolically eloquent. 

Already you begin to feel better. The 
fever of your wrath is dying down. There 
now remain four things to do. 

Sign your name, boldly and inkily and 
angrily. 

Read the letter out loud to yourself, put- 
ting in all the proper emphasis and venom. 

Tear the letter up and throw it into the 
waste-basket. 

Then go out and take a long walk in the 
woods or streets, and forget the whole in- 
cident. 

[75] 



The Knack of It 



My word for it, you'll come back feeling 
a great deal better. And perhaps the next 
time you meet your enemy — who may be 
a dear friend — you'll hold out your hand, 
and the incident will be ** all over." 

Whatever way you do it, however, be 
sure you let the bile escape, somehow. 
This allowing bile to simmer under the 
frame of a man's being, engendering more 
bile, is likely to lead to an unseemly ex- 
plosion some time when he least expects it. 

I remember once being in company with 
a meek little man who looked as if he 
couldn't say boo to a goose, even if the 
goose were anxious to have boo said to it. 
We were waiting for a trolley on a 
crowded street in New York and bicycles 
were passing and repassing, as it was near 
the tempting roads of one of the city's 
parks. 

A little girl started to cross the street 
just as a wheelman came along at a speed 
[76] 



On Venting Ones Spleen 

above the legal rate. He clumsily ran into 
her, and knocked her down, and went 
right on, while she lay where she had 
fallen. 

My meek friend suddenly found a sten- 
torian voice and hurled it after the escap- 
ing wheelman, saying : " Stop 1 Get ofi 
that wheel I " 

The fellow stopped as if he had been 
lassoed, and my friend went briskly up to 
him, and in a voice surcharged with indig- 
nation, said : ** What do you mean by 
trying to evade responsibility ? You run 
over a child and then you try to escape. 
How do you know how much you've in- 
jured her, you coward ? Fm a wheelman 
myself, and Fm ashamed to think that a 
fellow wheelman can do such a thing." 

The wheelman who had been stopped 
was as large again as my meek friend, but 
he came back, looking very contrite, and 
asked the little girl if she was hurt. 
[77] 



The Knack of It 



By a miracle she had not even a bruise, 
although he had sent her headlong. The 
big fellow apologized to her, gave her 
a quarter, and, looking crestfallen, he 
mounted his wheel and rode off, and then 
my meek friend said to me : " Say, I be- 
lieve I won't go with you. I feel sort of 
weak." 

The vehemence of his sudden upbubbling 
of righteous anger had left him unstrung. 

The small man had right on his side, 
and right was kind enough to loan him 
courage for a few brief moments ; while 
wrong robbed the wheelman of his usual 
brute force and made him like clay in the 
hands of the meek one. 

It is pertinent to this talk to say that my 
friend who causes the cellar to reverberate 
with his vituperations is at heart a kindly 
man. The very fact that he is willing to 
pour his abuse into a cellar instead of 
mortally offending some man by it is in it- 
[78] 



On Venting Ones Spleen 

self a proof that his anger has a comic ele- 
ment in it. 

Most anger is comic when you come 
right down to it. Even my meek little 
friend looked funny to me when browbeat- 
ing the wheelman, although I was proud 
of him for doing his duty ; but anger is 
seldom impressive to a third party. 

Think of this the next time you set out 
to demolish a man by the fury of your 
voice. And if your anger is comic to your 
victim, then you are giving a gratuitous 
performance of utter fatuity. 



[79] 



X 

Pass It Along 

SUPPOSE I do you a kindness. 
This is just supposing, and I say 
"I" and **you" because it sounds 
better than "A" and "B." 

Just to get the thing started let us sup- 
pose that I do you a kindness.] 

If you are one sort of man — the sort 
commonly known as the ingrate — you will 
promptly forget that I befriended you even 
though the results of my befriending are 
tangible, and that will end the matter. 

If you are the very just man, you will 
bear in mind early and late the fact that I 
advanced you certain kind acts, and just as 
soon as you can return those kind acts you 
will do it. 

If we live in the country, and on Mon- 
day I send you in a luscious muskmelon. 

[80] 



Pass It Along 



of which I have a goodly supply, you will 
not rest until you have sent me some of 
your justly celebrated tomatoes. 

If you are out walking, and I drive by 
and pick you up and give you a lift of 
several miles on your road, you will have 
it on your conscience until you have 
made some return to me for my kindness, 
because that's the sort of man you are. 

If I ask you to take pot-luck with me at 
my suburban home, and you accept the in- 
vitation, nothing will do you but I must 
lunch with you before the week is out, be- 
cause you hate to owe any one anything. 

Well, you are certainly better than the 
ingrate, but there is a type of man whom I 
admire more than I admire you. 

I do him a kindness that does not cost 
me a great deal, at a time when a kindness 
means everything to him. 

He may not say much in the way of 
thanks to me, but I know he is not an in- 
[81] 



The Knack of It 



grate, and I am not at all surprised to 
hear that he considers that he owes to 
humanity what I advanced to him. 

I knew of a steady market for a line of 
work which — well, call him Marcy — could 
turn out readily, and I gave him a letter to 
the editor. 

He isn't much of a talker, Marcy isn't 
When I met him a day or two later he 
said : ** Oh, Judson thinks I can do a 
series of yarns for his Ananias depart- 
ment." 

That's all. Not a word of thanks, but a 
something in his voice and look that 
showed he appreciated the fact that I was 
glad to do him a good turn. 

But in a month or two an artist who had 
never had a chance to make good was il- 
lustrating Marcy' s stuff, and the editors of 
other magazines were talking about it and 
giving him orders. And the brilliant war- 
series that appeared in one of the big 

[82] 



Pass It Along 



monthlies was due to Marcy's suggesting 
Judson for the job. 

And Judson, by the way, set up a pho- 
tographer who had never done anything 
outside of Central Park, but who was glad 
to buy a large kodak on tick and go to 
South Africa with Judson. 

I was curious enough to follow up the 
potential endless chain I had started roll- 
ing. 

The clever artist was one of the same 
kind as Marcy, and when the orders for 
his work began to come in he went around 
to call on a clever little writer who lives 
down in old Greenwich village, and told 
her that he thought some old New York 
stories illustrated by him would go in the 
Penury. And they made an instantaneous 
hit, and led to her doing that even more 
famous series in McKenzies — tales that 
served to introduce a protege of hers fresh 
from Cooper Union, who did not stick to 

[83] 



The Knack of It 



illustrating very long, but took up portrai- 
ture, and is now making a comfortable liv- 
ing in Paris — carrying coals to Newcastle, 
as it were. 

Judson, as I said, set up a photographer 
whose fortune was made just as soon as his 
dreamy, imaginative photographs were 
made, and who is now a member of 
every photographers' association in the 
world. 

But he was of the just type. He figured 
that he owed Judson a certain amount of 
gratuitous work, and he wrote him a letter, 
which I saw, in which he calculated that 
a dozen framed photographs of scenes 
around Cape Town would liquidate his 
debt to Judson. And when that debt was 
liquidated, as near as I can make out, he 
felt that there was no need for him to do 
anything else but'get ahead himself as fast 
as he could climb. He even ** knocked '* 
a man who was trying for a little picayune 
[84] 



Pass It Along 



job on a paper, and the knock denied him 
entrance. 

Of course, if I borrow fifty dollars from 
Judson and pay Marcy fifty dollars, it is 
not going to do Judson any good unless 
Marcy also owes Judson fifty and pays 
him — and even that doesn't release me. 

But money debts generally take care of 
themselves if we are honest and the other 
fellow is patient. It's the debts of another 
sort that can be paid by just passing them 
along the line. 

Some kindnesses that were begun cen- 
turies ago are still being passed along. 

An Englishman was condemned to the 
flames of Smithfield because he would not 
change his religion. 

It's all in Fox's " Book of Martyrs." 

The night before his proposed execution, 
a neighbour of his — and of the opposite re- 
ligion — helped him to make his escape 
from prison, and gave him funds to get to 

[85] 



The Knack of It 



a ship sailing for America, where he found 
religious liberty. 

In his old age it came to his knowledge 
that a man had been imprisoned for debt 
in the little town of Windsor, Connecticut, 
in which both lived. He made inquiries, 
and, finding that the man was the grand- 
son of the neighbour who had befriended 
him, he paid his debts and enabled him to 
gain his freedom. 

The released one, whose name, by the 
way, was Mather, left Connecticut, and 
went back to England because his year in 
prison had soured him on American insti- 
tutions. 

He never tired of telling what Asaph 
Loomis had done for him, and his sons 
and grandsons treasured the story as a 
family tradition. 

Some seventy years later a great-grand- 
son of Asaph Loomis, through the female 
line, one Eliphalet Taintor, went to Italy to 
[86] 



Pass It Along 



study art, and while there he fell sick of the 
Roman fever and was in a critical state. 
One of his fellow students was a young 
Englishman by the name of Loomis 
Mather, and it turned out that he was the 
great-grandson of the Mather who had left 
Windsor. 

He couldn't do enough for Taintor when 
he found out that he was a great-grandson 
to old Asaph, but the American art-student 
died, and his name became only a family 
memory. 

In the early years of the nineteenth cen- 
tury an Englishman bearing the name of 
Asaph L. Mather came to Connecticut and 
settled in Hartford. He was a talented 
fellow, with letters to Lydia Huntley 
Sigourney, and he was taken up by the 
literary set in Hartford. 

He was not a very moral young man, 
and he did something that raised a good 
deal of a commotion in the staid little com- 

[87] 



The Knack of It 



munity. Everybody dropped away from 
him excepting a young man of the name 
of Elkanah Taintor. He beHeved him 
guiltless of the charge, and as you can see 
by consulting papers of that date, he de- 
termined to prove him innocent because 
he was the grandson of the English art- 
student who had befriended his great-uncle 
in Italy I 

Unfortunately the proofs were too dam- 
ning, and Mather had to leave Hartford, but 
last summer, when a certain resident of 
Simsbury, Connecticut, a grandson of 
Elkanah Taintor, visited England, he was 
invited to spend a month — a delightful 
month it proved — at the home of a man 
he had met casually at the Savage Club 
in London. 

And strangely enough the name of the 
Savage was Asaph Taintor Mather. 

All because old Asaph Lomas — as he 
spelled the name — was saved from the 
[88] 



Pass It Ah 



ng 



Stake by a neighbour way back in Shakes- 
peare's time. 

It would be worth your while to try to start 
some such endless chain as this and then, 
if possible, come back in the year 2568 and 
see if you could count the links. Even if 
you have no expectation of coming back it 
won't do any harm to start the chain, be- 
cause some one else will benefit by one or 
another of the links therein. 

If you owe a debt of kindness that is 
represented by one hundred, split it up 
into denominations of ten and keep on pay- 
ing it. You'll never regret it, and the 
twenty-first century will feel the effects 
of it. 



[89] 



XI 

On Housekeeping and Servant^ 
Keeping 

I HEARD of a woman, the other day, 
who has had the same cook and the 
same housemaid — or " up-stairs girl," 
as they used to call them when I was a 
boy — for fifteen years. 

Of course at first I thought it was a 
fairy-story. Here? In America? And 
Irish girls at that? And an American 
mistress ? I felt that if it was really true 
I must lose no time in seeking an inter- 
view with this remarkable woman, that I 
might, possibly, account for it in her ap- 
pearance. I said to myself : *' A woman 
who has put up with the same insolent 
girls for fifteen years must be an object of 
pity by now. Perhaps she is kindly to the 

[90] 



On Housekeeping 

verge of foolishness. Or perhaps the serv- 
ants are bound to her by the terms of a 
quaint will. I'll go and see her." 

A mutual friend gave me a letter of in- 
troduction to her, and I went to her house 
that very day. Presenting my card, I was 
ushered into a comfortable parlour that 
looked as if people lived in it — nothing 
stiff, you know, but just ** cozy." 

The maid who let me in was a rather su- 
perior-looking woman of thirty-five, or 
thereabouts, with pretty, Irish eyes, and 
as I looked at her and realized that she 
had been in that house for fifteen years, I 
felt like asking her if she'd mind being ex- 
hibited to New York housewives at so 
much a head. 

Pretty soon a sweet-looking woman, not 
yet fifty, came into the room. She was 
not old-fashioned, and yet she had not the 
assertiveness, the ** bounce," of some of 
the new women of to-day. And, by the 

[91] 



The Knack of It 



way, some of these " new " women were 
made over forty years ago. 

" Mrs. Ailing, I want to be very inquisi- 
tive and perhaps impertinent," said I, when 
she had made me take a chair and had sat 
down herself. 

She smiled, and, having already read 
my letter, said : " Really, my case is not 
at all extraordinary. There are lots and 
lots of women who have kept servants 
year after year. It is so easy that I won- 
der more do not do it." 

" Easy ? " said I. " Why, Mrs. Ailing, 
don't you know that the doors of the intel- 
ligence-offices can never be shut because 
of the constant stream of cooks and maids 
returning from * week-ends ' at houses they 
have tried ? " 

She laughed in a wholesome way that 
gave me an inkling of her secret. 

**Why, of course there are girls and 
girls just as there are mistresses and mis- 

[92] 



On Housekeeping 

tresses. I don't claim to be anything re- 
markable, but it struck me when I began 
housekeeping that, in a small house like 
this, a servant must be, in a measure, a 
part of the family ; so I carefully secured a 
neat girl and " 

" You don't mean to tell me that you in- 
tended treating her as if she had a soul and 
a body?" 

" That's exactly what I did," said Mrs. 
Ailing. 

*' And had she?" 

" She most certainly had. I found that, 
like myself, she could get tired, and that I 
mustn't tax her beyond her strength. I 
also found that she had likes and dislikes, 
and that she valued a little time for her- 
self." 

" And you let her have it ? " said I in- 
credulously. " I mean beyond her every 
other Thursday out? " 

" Why, of course I did. I told her that 
[93] 



The Knack of It 



I wanted the kitchen kept in order, and for 
that and the cooking would pay her her 
wages, but that if her work was done well 
I didn't care when she did it, and so long 
as meals were on time and she let me 
know when she was going, she was wel- 
come to go out every day in the week." 

** Oh, but she must have presumed on 
that, and your husband had to go out and 
read her the riot act." 

Mrs. Ailing looked at me in unfeigned 
astonishment. 

" What possible occasion could my hus- 
band have for interfering with household 
affairs? Would I go to his office and 
scold his clerks for their mistakes ? " 

It was now my turn to be astonished. 

** Then you don't believe in a husband 
going into the kitchen and telling the 
cook, * I'm the man you've got to obey ; 
understand that ' .^ " 

" If there are husbands like that," said 
[94] 



On Housekeeping 

Mrs. Ailing, "it's no wonder that some 
girls don't stay. No, my husband leaves 
household affairs to me. He is always 
pleasant to Ann and to Mary, but he never 
tells them to do anything any more than I 
tell his clerks to do anything. 

** After Ann had been with us six months 
her sister came to this country, and, my 
husband's business having prospered, he 
thought he would relieve me of some of 
the actual housework by engaging Mary 
as up-stairs girl. 

"I kept Mary busy, but I remembered 
that she, too, was not a machine. She was 
inclined to be quick-tongued, but I told her 
sister about it, and showed her that Mary 
stood in her own light when she said pert 
things, and Ann gave her a sisterly talk- 
ing to " 

" Poor Mary ! " 

" And I had no more trouble from that 
source. Both Mary and Ann are interested 
[95] 



Th e Kn ack of li 



in all that concerns us and our children, 
and yet they never presume on it." 

*' They're unusual. You take a coarse- 
grained, common, filthy cook " 

" But why take her ? " asked Mrs. Ailing. 
" Why bring into your house and among 
your children a woman you would not 
wish to come in contact with any- 
where ? '* 

" But good servants are so hard to get," 
said I. 

** Because good mistresses are so hard 
to find. When the mistresses reform 
there'll be a reform among the girls. Half 
the servant troubles come from above- 
stairs. I know fussy housewives who 
insist upon the letter of service and for- 
get that it is the spirit that gives it 
life. 

" If I believe in one method of sweeping 
and Mary believes in another way that 
cleans the room just as well, I'm not going 

[96] 



On Housekeeping 

to force her to do it my way just for the 
sake of discipHne ; but there are martinets 
in households the same as in the army, 
and I have a friend who has a cook for 
every week, and who is always obeyed to 
the letter, or else " 

Mrs. Ailing hesitated. 

'' Or else what ? " 

" Or else the cook loses her head." 

** I should say that in that case the mis- 
tress had lost her head." I rose to go. 
"Well, really, you've given me food for 
thought. Is it possible that the fault is not 
at all on the servants' side ? " 

" I don't say that. As I hinted before, 
servants are human beings, and have 
faults ; but just as one farmer's wife will 
make the most refractory hen set on its 
eggs when another woman has no luck at 
all, so, by the exercise of tact, one house- 
wife will obtain marvellous results from un- 
promising raw material." 
[97] 



The Knack of It 



*' Don't you think it humbling to a 
woman's pride to exercise tact with a mere 
servant?" 

" Ah, now you are sarcastic ; but there 
are lots of women who, at the end of a 
year of heart-breaking troubles with serv- 
ants, say : * Well, at least I've not given 
in one jot or tittle.' As if their husbands 
married them in order that they might 
show their independence instead of run- 
ning a well-regulated house I And a house 
in which servants go off every week is not 
a well-regulated house." 

I offered Mrs. Ailing my hand. ** You've 
let in a flood of Hght on me," said I. ** Let 
me see : Make a careful selection of serv- 
ants in the first place ; then treat them as 
if they were almost as human as you are ; 
then practice the virtues of tact and for- 
bearance, and then, if you have domestic 
labour troubles " 

" It will be because this world isn't para- 

[98] 



On Housekeeping 

disc," said Mrs. Ailing, smiling as she 
bowed me out. 

I told this to a friend who said that Mrs. 
Ailing had simply been fortunate. " Most 
girls are ungrateful. I began by being a 
regular charitable institution to my first 
cook. I told her that it wasn't every one 
who would do as much for a mere servant, 
but that I was determined to keep her if 
honey would do it. But the ungrateful 
thing left me when her month was up. 
Since then I haven't tried and I ought to 
know what I'm talking about, for I had 
twelve cooks last winter." 

Which rather strengthens my faith in 
Mrs. Ailing' s system. 



[99] 



XII 

Mixed Pickles 

A YOUNG woman who was on her 
way home from business dropped 
a package addressed to herself 
and containing something very valuable to 
her. She did not discover her loss until 
she reached home, and then she was in 
despair. She was quite sure that she 
would never see the package again, as she 
lived out in New Jersey and she had lost it 
in New York. But next evening when 
she went home, there was the little box 
awaiting her. It had been picked up by 
some one, who put a couple of stamps on 
it and mailed it to the address upon it. 

The young woman was quite over- 
whelmed by the kindness of the unknown 
person ; she said it gave her a better idea 

[lOO] 



Mixed Pickles 



of human nature ; that people were not so 
bad, after all. 

Well, they're not. It doesn't require 
the dropping of an addressed package to 
find that out. 

Why, look here. Don't you suppose 
that if that young woman had picked up 
a similar package and had found that the 
address was not one in easy walking 
distance she would have put a stamp on it 
and dropped it in a letter-box ? 

What would you yourself do? You'd 
put a stamp on it and send it along. 

Well, do you think that you are any bet- 
ter than the average man or woman ? If 
you'd do it, so would almost any man. 

The thing is, however, always to ask 
yourself, when you read of or hear about 
or observe a kindly action : *' Would I 
do that? " And if you find you wouldn't, 
then it's up to you to raise your standard 
of kindliness and helpfulness. 

[lOl] 



The Knack of It 



\iyou would do it, then it isn't anything 
so very remarkable, because you are an 
average man, and you don't do things 
that lift you on a pinnacle of goodness. 

I am always ready to believe anything 
good that I hear about any one whatso- 
ever ; and I'm equally ready to believe 
anything bad. Your defaulting cashier is 
kind to his mother, and your sunny- 
tempered, unselfish man is hateful to his 
sister. 

Sometimes your defaulting cashier is 
hateful to his mother, but you'll find that 
he has his good points— perhaps he gives 
half of his stolen money to the poor, 
which is certainly better than if he spent 
it all on his own fleshly pleasures. 

And the sunny-tempered, unselfish man 
who is hateful to his sister ; what excuse 
can I make for him ? Shall I say that his 
sister is unpleasant and provokes his hate- 
fulness ? 

[I02] 



Mixed Pickles 



No, Fm not extenuating anything or 
setting down anything in malice — the 
sunny-tempered man has his weak spot, 
and his sister always makes him show it. 

He ought to be ashamed of himself, but 
he isn't — not often. One reason for this is 
that he is a human being. 

Once there was a man who was full of 
good deeds ; he was honest, upright, a 
kindly neighbour, a helpful son, a devoted, 
faithful husband, and a loving and 
brotherly father. The whole neighbour- 
hood respected him, loved him. 

He lived to be fifty years old, and still 
had the thoroughly deserved respect of his 
family, his neighbours, and his friends. 

If he had died at fifty he would have 
gone to glory with an unblemished repu- 
tation. 

But he lived to be fifty-one, and then he 
died — on the gallows. He had killed a 
man in a moment of sudden passion. 
[ 103] 



The Knack of It 



There was another man, crooked from 
his baby-days. He was a cheat, an un- 
scrupulous, mean, stingy, loveless and un- 
loved rascal, and the wonder of wonders is 
that he escaped the penitentiary. 

He lived to be forty-two, and then a fire 
broke out in the apartment in which he 
lived. He was escaping from the house 
when he heard a woman cry out in a room, 
the door of which he was passing. He 
tried the door, found it locked, burst it in, 
and found the woman so panic-stricken 
that she could do nothing but shriek. He 
tried to save her, with the flames roaring 
behind him, and she fought him by reason 
of the lunacy of fearful fright. At last he 
got her to the window and handed her to 
a fireman who appeared outside, and then, 
the opening of the window having created 
a sudden draft, he fell into the roaring 
flames and was burned to death. 

Do you remember the puzzle-pictures 
[ 104] 



Mixed Pickles 



that you used to have when you were 
children? The head of the ape could be 
set on the shoulders of the Newfoundland 
dog, and the noble-maned visage of the 
lion could be placed on the misshapen 
form of the baboon. 

Queer monstrosities resulted. 

There you have us ; you and me, near 
saints and real sinners. The kindly 
neighbour and upright man of business 
ought to have had a chance to go out of 
life saving the life of a woman. And it 
would have been fitting if the wicked, 
cheating rascal had come to the gallows. 
For he worked more harm in his life than 
a simple killing can work. 

But the one who designs the puzzle- 
pictures has his own reasons for making 
quaint forms of them, and we do not know 
why we are such mixed pickles — fifty-seven 
varieties in one man. 

There's excuse for despair in the proudest 

[105] 



Th e Kn ack of li 



moment of victory, and there's reason for 
hope in the darkest hour of defeat. 

There are loads of wicked rascals in this 
country, and it is no wonder that Europe 
holds up her hands in holy horror at the 
spectacle of so much successful unright- 
eousness. 

If there were not just as many success- 
ful rascals in Europe we might well feel 
abased at calling forth her honest indigna- 
tion. 

But there are thousands of young men 
and old men in this country who are sin- 
cerely trying to better existing conditions 
— men who ten years ago didn't care at all 
what happened as long as they were able 
to earn a decent living. 

When Pessimist looks at the wicked 
rascals he says : " This is the wickedest 
country that was ever coloured yellow on 
a map." 

And when Optimist looks at the zealots 
[ io6 ] 



Mixed Pickles 



who are wielding the muck-rake to good 
purpose, he says : ** This is the best coun- 
try that ever held its brotherly arms open 
to the oppressed of all nations." 

As it is the only country that ever did 
such a thing, Optimist is right. 

But he would be right if he didn't mod- 
ify his clause. And so would Pessimist. 

There was never so much evil as there is 
to-day, and there was never so much good. 

If it weren't for the evil on earth, this 
globe of ours would be heaven. 

And it sometimes occurs to me that 
heaven will be a place where the evil is en- 
tirely eliminated. 

Meanwhile, when you see an addressed 
package on the sidewalk be sure to stamp 
it and mail it. But don't glow with pride 
when you do it, and don't think when you 
hear of some one else doing it that the 
Millennium is slowing down to stop here. 
For it isn't. 

[107] 



A 



XIII 

The Heart of a Boy 

FRIEND came to visit me the 
other day. He was from Eng- 
land. Now, I have had friends 
from England before, and I have generally 
expected that they would condescend to 
admire certain of our institutions, and tell 
me in tones as affable as they could make 
them that, considering our youth, we were 
really doing very well. 

But this friend was different. 
Before leaving home for his holiday he 
took care to see that the heart of a boy 
which he possessed was in its proper place. 
He'll never see forty again, so this 
heart of a boy was given to him over four 
decades ago, but he has never cared to 
use any other. 

[io8] 



The Heart of a Boy 

As he was leaving his native town one 
of his friends, who had been over here, 
said : ** Well, I hope you'll have a good 
time." 

** I don't have to hope I will. I know 
I will," said he. 

" You'll find a good many crudities over 
there," said the friend. 

" Crudities are interesting, and they'll 
probably be different from our own crudi- 
ties," said he. 

" They're very young, you know." 

" Good for them. I like young people." 

** Ah, I'm afraid you're hopelessly opti- 
mistic," said his friend. 

" Well, if I were pessimistic, I'd certainly 
see a doctor at once, so that's another way 
of saying I'm in good health. I'm going 
to have the time of my life." 

Well, he's having it. 

He is disposed to like everything. He 
has critical faculties of a fine order, but 
[109] 



The Knack of It 



just now his faculty for enjoyment is being 
worked to the utmost. 

The day he arrived was bitter cold, the 
thermometer registering three degrees be- 
low zero, or "thirty-five degrees below 
freezing," as he phrased it, but it interested 
him. He had never known such cold in 
his life before, and it made his blood leap. 

He had stood, he said, on the forward 
deck as the steamer came up the bay, so 
as to get the first possible glimpse of New 
York. It was early in the morning, and 
mist softened the lines of the great sky- 
scrapers which have entered into a com- 
pact to hide old Trinity from the view of 
returning Americans. 

** Really," said he, ** that's a noble sky- 
line you have. It might be a great castle 
on a height. The approach to your city 
is most beautiful. I had heard that sky- 
scrapers were ugly, but seen in the atmos- 
phere of this morning they are worthy of 
[no] 



The Heart of a Boy 

the brush of the most poetic of painters. 
I'll never forget my sail up the bay. It 
was worth the voyage across, really." 

That was a good beginning. Then, as 
we stood waiting for his baggage to come 
up out of the hold, a man stepped up to 
him, and asked him if he cared to cable 
home. 

Of course he did, and, the cable sent, he 
was lost in admiration of our systematic 
way of doing things. 

He had smuggled nothing — as I say, he 
is not an American — and he came through 
the customs inspection with flying colours, 
and, having been very urbane himself, was 
delighted with the urbanity of the in- 
spector. 

"Really, you know, I had heard that 
your customs inspection was so very 
odious. Upon my word, people do exag- 
gerate." 

I did not tell him of certain unpleasant 

[III] 



The Knack of It 



experiences of my own on returning from 
abroad. If he was in a mood to be de- 
lighted, far be it from me to rake up an- 
cient history with a muck-rake. 

I took him out to my suburban home, in 
New Jersey, and he found much to his Hk- 
ing in the "wooden villas." That they 
were built of wood struck him as being 
very odd. 

" Wood is so expensive, you know." 

He also liked the nip in the air. 

'' Makes me feel like taking a walk." 

The nip in the air struck me as having 
something of cruelty in it, as it seized hold 
of my ears, and made them tingle most 
unpleasantly, but we set out into the coun- 
try with swinging step. 

He loved the winding, frozen river, the 
birches and willows that skirted its banks, 
the white trunks and reddish branches en- 
livening the winter landscape. 

Sordid-looking houses he passed by with- 

[112] 



The Heart of a Boy 

out comment, seemingly not noticing them, 
but when we came on some graceful 
colonial house, set in a grove of trees, or 
a quaint old Dutch house, a hundred and 
fifty years old, and nestling comfortably 
in the snow, he said : 

" My word, but I thought they said 
America was not picturesque. I wish Fd 
brought my sketch-book. And this air is 
very invigourating." 

And he broke out whistling like a boy. 

Later on he took his first sleigh ride at 
sunset through a mountainous part of New 
Jersey, and then his artistic soul revelled 
in the beauty of it all. 

" This is very jolly I To be wrapped up 
so warmly, and to be gliding smoothly 
over the snow. This might be in Norway. 
And they told me it was a prosaic country, 
and that I mustn't look for beauty outside 
of New England. Really, where are 
people's eyes ? '' 

["3 J 



The Knack of It 



All things contributed to his delight. 
A few days after his arrival the weather 
softened, and the snow followed its 
example, making walking sloppy. He 
went out for a walk, and got his feet wet. 

" I now see why your people wear what 
you call 'rubbers.' I believe Til get a 
pair." 

When they were on his feet he was as 
proud as a child with his first pair of 
shoes. 

All was fish that came to his net. One 
evening it would be a dinner at a New 
York artists' club, where he met a lot of 
** most interesting men," with whom he 
chatted afFably, and who took a liking to 
this extraordinary Englishman, who made 
himself at home everywhere — not realizing 
that the explanation of the phenomenon 
lay in the fact that he had never changed 
his boyish heart for one of more mature 
make. 

["4] 



The Heart of a Boy 

A vaudeville show, a church sociable, a 
prowl on the East Side, a visit to the art 
galleries on Fifth Avenue, attendance at 
church of a Sunday morning — all con- 
tributed to his enjoyment, because he was 
interested in all phases of humanity, and 
was not ashamed to show it. 

At the theatre he clapped harder than 
most, and when he was especially pleased 
he shouted : " Bravo ! " 

There was just one thing that made all 
this possible to him ; there is one good 
and sufficient reason for the fact that he 
will go back to England thoroughly 
pleased with his experiences. 

He had had the foresight years before 
to make arrangements for the continuance 
in service of his heart of a boy, and with 
that beating under his waistcoat he could 
not help but find this world a most engag- 
ing place. 

To men who have this type of heart it 

[115] 



The Knack of It 



matters little what country they are in, or 
what is done to please them. 

Every country is God's country, each 
day has its store of delights, every one you 
meet can be made to furnish his quota of 
interesting material, present annoyances 
may be made to yield future mirth, if the 
heart is young. 

Perhaps you can't make your own heart 
any younger than it is, but you can try to 
keep it from growing any older. Preserve 
it in high spirits ; there are no spirits that 
are such a good preservative. 

What matter if your grandfather didn't 
leave you any of his estate as long as he 
left you his unconquerable spirits. 

The heart of a boy. What a legacy I 



[Ii6] 



XIV 

On Revering Riches 

SOME one told me yesterday that 
there are still people in this world 
who revere riches ; that is to say, 
there are those who look up to ordinary 
people who have xaoney just because they 
have it. 

We all know that money plus kindliness, 
generosity, right feeling, is better than 
kindliness, generosity, right feeling, with- 
out money, for the reason that money con- 
verts kindly impulses into charitable acts ; 
but money plus, it may be, pomposity, 
narrow-mindedness, ostentation and sel- 
fishness — why, what is there to admire in 
that ? And who with brains would admire 
wealth in that guise ? 

You, a poor clerk with the desire to 
make the world happier and a wish to do 
["7] 



Th e Kn ack of It 



your work well, are a bigger figure than 
your rich employer, if he is a Gradgrind, 
or if he thinks that his mere riches add a 
whit to his character. 

I know very well that there have been 
those who taught us to look up to the man 
who, by a strict looking out for number 
one and a royal disregard for the rights of 
others, had amassed a fortune, and at the 
age of fifty was gray side-whiskered, re- 
spectable — and supercilious. 

But now we are being forced to believe 
that no man can be absolutely honest and 
become what is called a plutocrat, a mas- 
ter of tens of millions ; and therefore we 
who are poor but honest, like our parents 
before us, are coming to see that, as Amer- 
icans, we are every bit as good as the men 
who scatter middle-aged benefactions 
where they will make the most noise. 

Now, mind you, dislike for the rich 
simply because they are rich shows nar- 
[118] 



On Revering Riches 

row-mindedness and a petty disposition on 
your part. Don't think that just because 
you are a poor clerk and your employer is 
rich you are better than he is. It is pos- 
sible that he, with his thousands, does 
more good proportionately than you do 
with your talents and your miserable sal- 
ary. 

It may be that his brains are of a better 
kind than yours ; that he had kindlier an- 
cestors ; that his instincts are purer. 
There are rich men with an admirable an- 
cestry behind them, with splendid brains 
in their heads, and with big, warm hearts, 
that pump money as well as blood, and 
just because you are a poor clerk, it does 
not follow that you are better than they. 

In the matter of ancestry — it isn't a bad 
thing to look it up. Family pride, if it 
have a common-sense basis, is far better 
than purse-proudness. 

You are what you have made yourself 

[119] 



The Knack of It 



and what your associations have made 
you, plus — Fm fond of that word plus — 
what your father and mother and your two 
grandfathers and two grandmothers and 
your four great-grandfathers and great- 
grandmothers and your eight great-great- 
grandfathers and great-great-grandmoth- 
ers made you ; and if they were of sturdy 
stock, you have not only reason to be 
proud, but you have also incurred a duty. 
You should so live as to reflect credit on 
them who made you what you are. 

In other words, if your father was a min- 
ister and your grandfather a doctor, and 
your great-grandfather a farmer or a Con- 
tinental soldier, you certainly have good 
cause to poise your head straight above 
your backbone when you come into the 
presence of your rich employer, who may 
not know who his grandfather was. Your 
good family is worth as much as his money. 

But don't on the strength of it ask him 
[ 120] 



On Revering Riches 



to Sunday supper. You with your ten 
dollars a week and he with his eighty 
thousand dollars a year — why, he might 
not understand your motive. He might 
think that, instead of condescending to 
him, you were trying to placate him for 
some maladministration of office on your 
part. 

In fact, it is well to have as little to do 
with your rich employer as you can. Don't 
bow down to his riches, but also don't use 
up his noon hour in trying to explain to 
him that you esteem him only as a man, 
and that his dollars can go to Ballyhack 
for all you care. Rich employers never 
understand philosophic clerks, and a clerk 
with too much expressed philosophy is 
oftentimes a clerk without a job. And if, 
jobless, you rail at riches, people are sure 
to cry *' sour grapes." 

But let your despising of riches take the 
form of making the most of your opportu- 

[121] 



The Knack of It 



nities, and try to get more out of life than 
most rich men are able to extract. 

Perhaps, in spite of your miserable sal- 
ary, you have a better ear for music than 
your rich employer has. Cultivate your 
love for music. Go to good concerts and 
the opera and sit up in the ''peanut gal- 
lery," for music, like smoke, ascends, and 
harmonies blend as they go up, and you 
in the cockloft get a better tone-picture than 
your howling swells in the five-dollar seats, 
wljo perhaps don't care for music at all. 

It may be that even if you are underpaid 
by that rich employer of yours, you have a 
more ardent love for nature than he. He 
may be blind to the beauties that lie in a 
walk through the country. If he is, take 
my word for it that not all the money in 
the world will buy him a better love for it. 
So there you have — perhaps a legacy from 
one of your plain ancestors — a gift that he 
has not. Cultivate it. 

[ 122] 



On Revering Riches 

It is not beyond belief that through your 
love of nature you have a taste for pictures 
that he with his expensive gallery, made 
up entirely of Old World paintings, does 
not have and never will have. His pic- 
tures were bought for him by his agents, 
and he relies on their word as to their 
value as works of art. But you, with your 
love for nature and through your love for 
nature, are able to appreciate the beauty 
of a sincere picture without having any one 
at your elbow to point it out. 

And remember that you have galleries 
that are free if you live in any of the large 
cities — galleries where you can compare 
the native with the foreign work. Re- 
member, also, what is getting to be a 
greater truth day by day : that it is in this 
country that some of the best landscapes 
are being painted, and that when your rich 
employer pours out his dollars in European 
capitals for French and Italian modern 
[123] 

1 



The Knack of It 



landscapes, he could have got for a tenth 
of the sum better pictures of his own land 
painted by his own countrymen. 

You see, his riches have not taught him 
to know that American landscape art 
knows no superior, and is still in the as- 
cendant. When his pocketbook tells him 
so, then he will believe it. But you, using 
your own eyes and comparing the spon- 
taneous work of our American masters with 
the great nature that lies out of doors, al- 
ready believe it. And for your consolation 
let me tell you that the French critics in- 
dorse your opinion. 

So when they tell me that there are still 
people in this world who revere riches, and 
I look about and see that a man may be a 
good American citizen, and love nature 
and the arts and attend to his business 
dutifully, with nothing in the world but a 
poor salary to back him, I say that if such a 
man does revere mere riches, he is foolish. 
L 124] 



XV 

On the Golden Rule 

THAT Golden Rule is a queer sort 
of proposition. There was a man 
out in Toledo named Jones, and 
he actually lived by the Golden Rule — he 
did unto others as he would that they 
should do unto him. 

What was the result? What was the 
inevitable result? 

Why, people said he was crazy. 
That is, some people said so ; others said 
he was up to some game. 

And he was simply following that rule 
that the sanest man who ever lived gave 
us as a means of attaining happiness in 
this world and the next. 

Nineteen hundred years of preaching of 
that kindly doctrine, and they call " Golden 
Rule" Jones either crazy or knavish. 
["5] 



The Knack of It 



This is a queer world. 

But I want to tell you that every one did 
not think Jones crazy. Some of the men 
whom he benefited thought it the most 
natural thing in the world that he should 
do unto them as he would have them do 
unto him, and they passed the good word 
along that he was giving people " a square 
deal," and I would not be a bit surprised 
if the United States, in 2006, would be a 
better place just because that ** eccentric" 
fellow Jones lived here in the closing years 
of the nineteenth century and followed the 
teaching of a man who taught nineteen hun- 
dred years ago and who still has influence. 

There are some people who hate to be 
Christians, and probably if any one asked 
you and me pointblank if we were Chris- 
tians, the answer in each case would either 
be a hesitating affirmative or a shame- 
faced negative or a hesitating negative or 
a shamefaced affirmative. 

[126] 



On the Golden Rule 

But there are men who aren't good 
" Christians " who try to follow the Golden 
Rule. 

I dare say there are men who swear 
an^ drink and do most of the things that 
most of us do who yet try to follow the 
dictates of the Golden Rule — sometimes. 

They are not Christians, and yet they 
are friendly to Christ and His teach- 
ings. 

A hundred years ago there were a good 
many philosophers who ridiculed Christ 
and tried to set Him aside as an impossi- 
ble person, but the world has grown 
kindlier and broader as it has grown older, 
and now we have absolute infidels who 
say boldly that Christ was perhaps the 
best man who ever lived. 

Some of us use Christ's name to swear 
by — those of us who do not consider swear- 
ing bad form — and yet even we who do 
that would not stand for any besmirching 

[127] 



The Knack of It 



of Christ as a man and as a brother to 
men. Why is that ? Is it because at the 
back of our brains we Americans have a 
good deal of reverence ? 

Foreigners say that we hold nothing 
sacred excepting the Almighty Dollar ; 
but, look here : What would happen if a 
man came out on the vaudeville stage and 
began to make fun of Abraham Lincoln ? — 
I don't care whether the vaudeville show 
was in Boston or Galveston or San Fran- 
cisco or St. Louis or Chicago or Washing- 
ton or in a Western mining-town on the 
new boom — there's just one thing would 
happen every time : that man would be 
hissed off the stage, and, like as not, if he 
were playing a circuit, he'd be short-cir- 
cuited at once by the manager. 

Well, if we have that sort of feeling for 
a man who died over forty years ago and 
who was never seen by millions of the 
men who love and venerate him in this 

[128] 



On the Golden Rule 

country to-day, we have that feeling by 
virtue of something that he did and stood 
for. 

And he stood for the Golden Rule. 

He wasn't much on churchgoing or 
psalm-singing, although some very good 
men have gone to church and have sung 
psalms — if they had the voice (and some- 
times they have sung without the voice — I 
know, for I've sat behind 'em) — but he did 
have the highest reverence for the man 
who first enunciated the Golden Rule, and 
he tried to steer himself and the country 
by the laws laid down in it. 

We're a nation of money-grubbers — any 
one on the other side of the water will tell 
you so, even those who have never been 
here, and they ought to know — but our 
national idols are not Rockefeller or Car- 
negie or Harriman, but Lincoln and Grant 
and Washington — and not one of the 
latter trio could have signed his check for 
[129] 



The Knack of It 



a hundred thousand dollars at any stage 
of the game. 

What does that prove? It proves that 
there is some sort of shamefaced idealism 
about us Americans, after all. 

And it's a strange thing that not only- 
Lincoln, but Grant and Washington, did 
quite a little Golden Rule business. 

When General Grant, in his tour of the 
world, was travelling in Japan, he visited 
the sacred bridge of Nikko. No one ever 
crosses this bridge but the mikado him- 
self ; but General Grant was the great 
representative of a great and friendly- 
people, and the mikado paid him the un- 
heard-of compliment of opening the bridge 
to him. 

What did General Grant do ? 

He thanked the mikado for his kindli- 
ness of feeling, but, with a tact that one 
would not have looked for in a soldier, he 
did not step on the bridge. 
[ 130] 



On the Golden Rule 



What rule did he obey ? 

Infant class, please stand up and say in 
unison : 

*' Q,o\dtin Rule ! " 

Very good. You may sit down. 

And it seems to me that there were 
traces of the Golden Rule in his treatment 
of another Golden Rule man, General 
Robert E. Lee, at Appomattox. That was 
a heart-stirring incident in American his- 
tory. 

And General Lee also was very much of 
a Golden Rule man. It may be a mere 
coincidence, but the South worships Gen- 
eral Lee and not the greatest Southern 
millionaire. 

Really, there is something in this Golden 
Rule. 

A good place to see what it is not is the 
Brooklyn Bridge at the rush-hour. They 
say that every American is a ruler, but 
there are few Golden Rulers at the bridge. 

[ 131 ] 



Th e Kn ack of It 



One reason is that most of them are tem- 
porarily either insane, or else wild beasts, 
and you can't look for the Golden Rule in 
either insane people or wild beasts. 

This would seem to prove that Golden 
Rule Jones was not as insane as some of 
his detractors thought. 

It's the queerest thing what odd speci- 
mens of humanity sometimes practice the 
Golden Rule. You all know the story of 
the drunken man who went into the Iro- 
quois Theatre, in Chicago, a few years ago, 
and annoyed a woman and her little girl 
to such an extent that she was on the 
point of having him put out of the 
theatre. 

But, without knowing it, a world-re- 
nowned drama, in which she and he and 
the little girl and hundreds of others were 
to take part, was just on the point of be- 
ing enacted before her eyes. As far as 
she was concerned, she was first old 
[132] 



On the Golden Rule 

woman, the drunken man was hero, and 
the child was the heroine. 

The frightful flames burst into that thea- 
tre, and men and women became beasts 
and trampled each other in a rush to es- 
cape from the fiery tomb. Then the man 
became sobered enough to remember the 
Golden Rule, and, catching up the little 
girl, he made his way to the. street with 
her and she was restored to her mother on 
the sidewalk. 

Why, there's not one of us who hasn't 
obeyed the rule at one time or another, 
and there's not one of us who doesn't hold 
the late John Hay in the highest respect 
because he was the first Golden Rule dip- 
lomat — and a highly successful one. 

Some people call Golden Rule Jones 
crazy, but the most of us believe that he 
had a rule that is a safe guide for conduct. 
And the beauty of it for most of us — for 
you and me especially, dear reader — is 
[ 133] 



Th e Kn ack of It 



that when we find it interfering with our 
chances of success we forget it — we cut it 
out. 

But it is much better to remember it. A 
well known millionaire has recently said 
that business is war. Surely he is mis- 
taken. War is a suspension of the Golden 
Rule, generally for political reasons, and 
political reasons should never govern busi- 
ness. I am afraid that our friend the 
millionaire was not talking of legitimate 
business but of the game of grab that has 
made so many of our men with daughters 
objects of interest to the nobility of other 
lands. 

Now the first rule of the game of grab is 
" Let's forget the Golden Rule." 

But it is by no means a dead letter to 
those who remember the other fellow and 
do not try to lift themselves up by tramp- 
ling him down. 



[134] 



XVI 

On Being Popular 

THE trouble with a great many men 
and women who seek popularity 
through the retailing of their per- 
sonal ailments and misfortunes is that they 
don't make the recital interesting enough. 

If I meet Brown and he says : *' Isn't it 
a beautiful day ? " and I immediately say : 
** I hadn't noticed the weather. Do you 
know, I lay awake last night for nearly 
three hours with a nasty, tickling cough ? " 
it is not going to make me a favourite with 
Brown. 

You see, the statement is too bald, and, 
besides, I have ignored something that 
Brown is interested in and substituted 
something that only I am interested in. 

If, on the contrary, I meet Brown and 
say : *' Isn't this a beautiful day ? " and he 

[135] 



The Knack of It 



says : " Yes, it's a day to make you glad 
you^re alive," I feel that my opinion has 
been well bolstered up and am willing to 
hear more from Brown. And he goes on 
to say : "I was glad there were no bur- 
glars in my house last night." 

That attracts my attention at once be- 
cause one wonders why a man should 
make such an obvious remark. 

I ask him why, and he says : " Why, 
almost any burglar would have been an- 
noyed at my cough. It was most discon- 
certing. I felt like a whole consumptive 
colony. I coughed so much in the night 
that I used up my entire stock of coughs 
and haven't coughed since." 

Now, Brown has told me of a trouble, 
and I have troubles of my own ; but his 
way of telling disarms criticism, and I find 
myself wishing he'd have the measles or 
something else that he could embroider in 
a whimsical way. I go on a little farther 

[ 136 ] 



On Being Popular 

and meet Mrs. Haskell, and no sooner do I 
see her than I quicken my step and make 
as if I were in a great hurry. Why? 
Mrs. Haskell is an extremely pretty 
woman, and she is bright and well-read. 
But I know from the expression of her face 
that she has a trouble that I can't help by 
sympathy, and I know she won't interest 
me in telling it. 

Sure enough. " Oh, good-afternoon. I 
suppose you know where Fm going ? '^ 

** To a whist party? " 

" No such luck for me. I'm without a 
girl again, and I am on my way to try to 
get another. I never seem to be able to 
keep a girl. I do think that things have 
come to a pretty pass in this country. 
What are we going to do ? I think it is 
perfectly scandalous the way girls leave 
attractive places for no reason in the world 
but spite." 

It is scandalous, but Mrs. Haskell is not 

[137] 



The Knack of It 



increasing her popularity by telling me her 
woes in such a bald and complaining way. 
As a matter of fact, I am sick of the sub- 
ject, for I, myself, am on my way to see a 
girl who has been well recommended and 
whom I hope to keep for at least a week 
end. 

It isn't so much the woes one has as the 
way one retails them that affects popu- 
larity. 

Here comes Mrs. Borden, all smiles, and 
I know that she lost two servants yester- 
day — her coachman and her cook. 

" Don't you want to start a cooperative 
colony," she says, nodding her pretty head, 
" and be my coachman, if I'll be your cook ? 
I heard from your wife that you'd lost your 
cook, and I've lost both coachman and 
cook. But it was just because Janet was 
so pretty and Sam so handsome and she 
used to invite him in to dinner every day. 
He liked her dinners so well that he pro- 

[138] 



On Being Popular 

posed that she cook for him, and I'm on 
my way to their wedding. Afterwards, 
Tm going to advertise for a coachman who 
is too old to marry, and a plain cook — the 
plainer the better." 

And so she rattles on. Her troubles are 
as real as those of Mrs. Haskell, but she 
makes a jest of them, and so you don't 
mind hearing about them. You probably 
answer in kind ; and if you do, you in- 
crease your popularity with yourself. 
That in itself is a good thing. A man 
who is unpopular with himself is in a par- 
lous state — whatever that is. 

One of the quickest ways of becoming 
popular is as follows : You have a cun- 
ning little boy, aged five. I have one 
aged three, just as cunning — as a matter 
of fact far more so, 

I meet you on the ferry-boat and politely 
ask you how your boy is ; and, without 
waiting for your answer, I say : ** You 
[ 139] 



The Knack of It 



ought to see my Freddy. He's only three, 
but he's a buster. Why, I believe he's al- 
most as big as your John." 

You, being an angel and already ex- 
ceedingly popular, smother your natural 
instincts and say : " I dare say. Do tell 
me something about Freddy ; he is so 
original." 

And, although the ferry trip is a quarter 
of an hour long, I have no difficulty in fill- 
ing the entire time telling anecdotes about 
my remarkable child. Suppose you had 
taken up the time telling me about John. 
It wouldn't have pleased me half as much, 
and you would have become to me that 
most tiresome of mortals : the person who 
harps on the virtues of his children, to the 
exclusion of every other topic. 

Then there are men and women who try 
to achieve popularity by a most discon- 
certing frankness. 

I'm on my way to the train and I meet 
[ 140] 



On Being Popular 

Banks, who really looks as if he were in 
the last stages of consumption. Just to 
jolly the poor fellow along I say : ** You're 
looking better. Gaining a little every day, 
aren't you ? " 

And what does he say in reply ? " Oh, 
I'm all right. But say, old man, you look 
like a death's-head. What's the matter? 
Run down ? " 

" Yes, by an automobile," you answer 
sarcastically, and wish you'd told him how 
ill he looks. You know you're feeling well, 
but you stop at the next mirror and look 
at yourself and notice that you do look a 
little desk-tied, and you wonder whether 
you don't need a vacation. 

Banks ought to know better. If he 
is popular, it is in spite of his frank- 
ness. 

Of course, it is better to be honest than 
to be popular, but one does not have to 
tell the whole truth as if he were on a 

[141] 



The Knack of It 



witness-stand when he's merely passing the 
time of day. 

Think of the popular men you know, 
and try to remember how may times 
they've stopped you to tell you the names 
of their favourite complaints, or the witty 
remarks of their year-old twins, or the 
reason why they can't keep a servant 
through a rainy afternoon, or that you 
look like the next candidate for funeral 
honours. 

And then try to become popular your- 
self. 



[142 ] 



XVII 

On Getting Ones Money s Worth 

THE other day there were a hun- 
dred young people waiting at a 
railroad-station. They were go- 
ing on a day's outing, and from their looks 
money was not easy with them. 

To while the time away one of them 
suggested that they all get weighed. In- 
stantly the men began to fumble in their 
pockets for pennies, and it looked as if the 
insensate machine was going to be glutted 
with cents. 

But there was a wise young chap in the 
party. '* Look here, fellers," said he, 
" what's the matter with chipping in a cent 
apiece, buying a book and getting Kid 
Lacey to read to us?" 

** Kid Lacey " was evidently a popular 
reader, for the weighing-machine was for- 

[143] 



The Knack of It 



gotten, the book was bought at the news- 
stand, and I suppose when the young folks 
reached their destination some of the 
time was occupied in listening to him 
read. 

It struck me as a particularly wise use 
to which to put the money. As a writer 
of books I may be biased, but I appeal to 
you all if that group of picnickers did not 
have more fun in listening to Kid Lacey 
read — he had an elegant Irish brogue and 
seemed bubbling over with animal spirits 
— than they would have got out of the 
consciousness that Mamie weighed 130 
and that Jimmie weighed only 119 and 
that " Fatty " Lenihan weighed 195 — a 
loss of five pounds since summer set in. 

To spend wisely ; that's a problem 
that many people never consider. It is 
not likely that many of us are going to 
set much aside — most of us come to the 
end of the season or the end of the trip 
[ 144] 



On Getting One s Money s W^orth 

with every last cent spent and perhaps a 
doctor's bill not yet paid, but have we got 
the worth of our money ? 

I know a man who never goes to the 
theatre unless he can get orchestra seats 
for himself and his wife. After the play is 
over Black — to give him a name — feels 
that he must do "■ the proper thing," and 
so he takes his wife, who is a dyspeptic, 
to a *' lobster palace," and they eat lobster 
salad and ice-cream, and generally miss 
the last train, for they are suburbanites, 
and so have to put up at a hotel, and by 
the time his junket is over he has spent so 
near to ten dollars that a bootblack 
wouldn't scramble for the difference. His 
wife's digestion is upset, he is cross, and 
he thinks theatre-managers are sharks. 

That is throwing money away, in my 
opinion. It's all right to spend ten dol- 
lars on fun when you're getting only forty 
dollars a week, if you want to spend it, 

[145] 



The Knack of It 



but for pity's sake get the worth of your 
money. 

Black generally goes to some show that 
has been recommended by a business 
friend — for he knows little of the theatre 
himself, and he usually picks a play that 
disgusts both him and his wife, and makes 
them vow they won't go to the theatre 
again. And they don't — until next time ; 
and then it's orchestra seats again, and 
the same indigestible supper and a long 
journey home — if they don't miss the train 
— and a headache for his wife, anyhow. 

No, Black doesn't know how to get his 
money's worth. 

White comes nearer to doing it. White 
is a philosophical sort of chap, who never 
puts on any airs, and who never does a 
thing because every one else is doing it. 
He never played ping-pong. 

Just pause a ' moment and think what 
that means. 

[146] 



On Getting Ones Money s Worth 

White gets only thirty dollars a week, 
so he is not as well off as his neighbour, 
Black, but he knows a heap more about 
getting the worth of his money. 

He weighs what this one and that one, 
and this paper and that paper, say about 
current theatrical attractions, and then he 
picks out one that seems suited to his 
tastes. 

Then he and his wife get seats in the 
front row of the second balcony for a dol- 
lar a piece, and with the help of the opera- 
glasses which his grandfather used to 
look at Jenny Lind, he manages to see all 
there is to be seen, and Mrs. White has 
such good eyesight that she doesn't need 
opera-glasses. 

Both are very fond of the theatre, and he 
generally manages to pick a winner, and 
the two are mightily amused. 

He is past the age when golden-bucks 
ride easily, and his wife hates after-theatre 

[147] 



The Knack of It 



suppers, but they are both very fond of 
books, and he has the ridiculous habit of 
putting the supper-money into a volume 
of some classic, which he buys the after- 
noon of the day he is going to the 
theatrCo 

He reads it on the train going back, so 
it is he that gets the headache, but his 
wife just dozes ofi comfortably in the seat, 
and forgets that it's an awful nuisance go- 
ing home to the suburbs, and next day 
she's as fresh as a lark. 

He has added to their library, they have 
both had a good time, and have seen a 
play to which they will recommend their 
friends, and the whole cost has come under 
four dollars. 

White goes oftener to the theatre than 
Black does, because he has such good 
luck in picking amusing plays ; therefore, 
he spends as much on amusement as Black 
does, but he gets much more fun out of it 

[148] 



On Getting One s Money s Worth 

than his neighbour does, just because he 
is unwilling to spend for the mere sake of 
being like other people. 

When you have come to the end of the 
year and have regretted that you did not 
get more fun for your money, just count 
up how much you spent for the mere sake 
of doing the proper thing, and you'll find 
that you have thrown away enough to have 
paid for several outings. 

I know a man — my, the number of men 
I know when Fm writing one of these 
" preachments " ! — who has been a bachelor 
for forty-odd years, although he is a great 
admirer of women. And do you know 
why ? Because he says he cannot support 
a wife ** as a wife ought to be supported.'* 
He makes a goodish bit of money in a year 
— something like five thousand dollars — 
and he knows, or has known, lots of nice 
two-thousand-dollar girls, but he remains a 
lonely old bachelor, just because he never 
[ 149] 



The Knack of It 



learned how to get the worth of his money. 
He spends it all, but he isn't happy, be- 
cause he is naturally a family man — and 
he has no family. 

Think of the two-thousand-dollar girls 
who could have made him happy and en- 
abled him to soak away three thousand a 
year, if he had been so minded. 

Of course, if it pleases you to be consid- 
ered as belonging to a higher social 
stratum than is yours by right of income 
— if you are foolish enough to care two 
straws about incomes — if, I say, you spend 
your money on maintaining a proud posi- 
tion, and you feel your bluff has carried, 
I suppose it's no use to say to you that 
you have misspent your money or failed to 
get your money's worth ; but it does no 
harm to say that the persons who are really 
happiest when the end of the year comes 
are the ones who have been able to wrest 
a dollar's worth of happiness out of every 

[150] 



On Getting Ones Money s Worth 

dollar spent for pleasure. And they are 
never the rich. 

The other day a Britisher, a member of 
Parliament, came to visit us, and he wrote 
an article about New York which contained 
some unconscious humour. 

After showing that he spent a large part 
of his time meeting the newly rich, he con- 
tinues : 

Side by side with the reckless good- 
humour, the extravagant optimism of many 
classes in New York, I thought I saw a 
sombreness and unrest among the poor. 

It's quite likely he did. And the som- 
breness and unrest are likely to grow, 
more's the pity. 

But he goes on : 

And there is another class which I did 
not meet, but which must be even sadder 
and more pathetic, and that is the middle 
class, which has to get along with moder- 
ate means in this carnival of luxury and 

[151] 



The Knack of It 



extravagance and costliness. You must 
have money, and plenty of it, to find life 
tolerable ; that is what, finally, I felt about 
New York. 

And this last is the joke. Members of 
the middle class, allow me to extend to 
you my sympathy. 

If you cannot find life tolerable in New 
York, even without plenty of money, it is 
because you have never found out how to 
get the worth of what money you do 
spend. 

There are lots of fellows and their wives 
who are happy as fairy kings and queens 
in New York on less than two thousand 
dollars a year. 

But aping those who have better means 
won't bring happiness, nor the worth of 
your money. 



[152] 



XVIII 
A Word to Fathers 

DOES your boy stand in awe of you ? 
I have asked that question be- 
fore in print, but nobody answered 
me. Perhaps it was not read ; but as you 
are reading this, I repeat : Does your boy 
stand in awe of you ? 

If he does, why does he ? Is it because 
you are a director in half-a-dozen influen- 
tial business concerns and cannot forget 
the fact even at home ? 

If that is his reason for regarding you 
with awe, it won't be many years before 
his awe will change to amusement. For 
a boy after a time becomes a man, and if 
he has a sense of humour, he can't help 
being amused at pomposity, even if the 
inflated one is his father. 

[153] 



T/i e Kn ack of It 



Drop that stern face when you are with 
him, and let him into the secret that you 
are merely a human being like himself and 
not even a distant relative of the immortal 
gods. 

Tin gods on wheels — how many there 
are of them, and how many people bow 
down before them 1 

Now, it is a natural thing for some men 
to enjoy mounting a pedestal — like a cigar- 
store Indian — and looking down on the 
multitude ; but it is unfair to your boy to 
force him to join the gaping crowd. 

You really are not worth any man's 
worship. It may sound impertinent for 
me to say it, when I have never had the 
privilege of addressing you ; but you are 
not so very superior to the common run of 
humanity, and if your fellow men knew 
you as well as you know yourself you 
would not dare pose even as a tin god. 

So unbend to the boy, and let him feel 

[154] 



A Word to Fathers 

that he is almost your equal in the family 
at least. 

But perhaps he stands in awe of you be- 
cause you are a stern disciplinarian, and 
believes that you are his keeper, and he is 
in prison for a term of years — twenty-one, 
to be exact. 

That's a worse reason than the other. 
Discipline is as good for him as it is for 
you, but awe — I hate that word awe^ ex- 
cept as applied to one's impression of 
thunder-clouds, or stormy seas, or everlast- 
ing mountains. You are not a thunder- 
cloud — at least, I hope not — and you are 
not a stormy sea, and you are not an ever- 
lasting hill ; but just an erring human be- 
ing, with an innate and perhaps untried 
power of inspiring love. 

Your son ought to be your younger 

brother. You were a boy before he was, 

and did all the things you rebuke him for 

doing ; and you ought to take him on one 

[155] 



Th e Kn ack of It 



side and show him the folly of his course 
as evinced by your own failure to become 
a perfect man. 

Make a playmate of the boy. 

I'd rather have a son warmly affectionate 
to me than be a director in five ordinary 
business concerns and one life insurance 
company. 

" Stop I Here comes father I " That's 
what I heard a boy say to his brother. 
The two were lying under a tree after a 
game of tennis, singing a harmless song. 
I wondered if the father was a poor judge 
of music, for their voices were tuneful, or 
whether he was an invalid who had to be 
coddled — until I saw him. 

Five feet two at least, and as straight as 
a wooden Indian, with a rigid walk and 
an eye like an imitation Jove, and a stern, 
set mouth — I understood. 

He passed those boys then without a 
word, although he had not seen them 

[156] 



A Word to Fathers 

since morning, and went into the house as 
imposingly as five-feet-two can accom- 
plish such a thing. 

I thought of Mr. Peewee, who used to 
figure in the evening papers, and I won- 
dered if an ordinary pin would '* deflate " 
him. 

I was spending Sunday at the house 
next his, and I found out who he was : a 
martinet ; a man whose wife never called 
him anything but ** Mr." Brown ; presi- 
dent of an asphalt pavement company and 
director in three or four other concerns. 

Six months later, the asphalt company 
failed, and Mr. Brown's name was men- 
tioned in connection with some bribery at 
Albany, and the Browns left the suburb 
they had been living in. 

I couldn't help thinking how like a 
character in a book he was, and I won- 
dered whether he still kept up his awe- 
inspiring gait and behaviour. 

[157] 



The Knack of It 



I don't go so far as to say that if he had 
been " hail fellow well met " with his boys 
he would not have been guilty of bribery, 
but if he had not assumed such a pose of 
awesomeness he might have been com- 
forted by his boys when he fell on evil 
days. 

Get acquainted with your son, make a 
friend of him, renew your youth ; and 
when you die other people will really 
mourn you, and no one will refer to you 
as a solemn ass — which is another name 
for an awesome person. 



[158] 



E 



XIX 

Concerning Addition 

VERY little bit added to what 
you've got makes just a little bit 



I wish that I could print the music to 
that popular refrain as its felicitous rag- 
time adds to the catchiness of the dictum. 

** Every little bit added to what you've 
got jnakes just a little bit more.'* 

It's an amusing song, and the suggested 
advice is good. Strange how many 
people there are who do not act on it ! 

There were two brothers born within a 
year or two of each other and of the same 
parents — that's why they were brothers — 
but they were as different as day and night. 

One of them was always bent on accum- 
ulating experiences of one kind or another ; 
he was fond of music, fond of books, fond 

[159] 



The Knack of It 



of pictures. He possessed a good deal of 
curiosity regarding the habits of men, and 
neglected his business — so they say — in or- 
der to increase his stock of knowledge con- 
cerning mankind. But, after all, that was 
his own business. He was fond of going to 
the theatre, and while he always picked out 
good plays, still, in the opinion of his 
brother, he might have been employed stay- 
ing late at his office, heaping up dollars. 

The brother was heaping them up all 
right. Why, that man was the first one to 
reach his office and the last one to leave 
it. The office-boy always got tired of wait- 
ing for him and went home before him. 
You may be sure that his business 
prospered, and at thirty he was worth a 
hundred times as much as his unbusiness- 
like brother. He may have had an ear for 
music when he was a boy, but at thirty he 
had lost it, and regarded time spent at 
concerts as money thrown away. 
[i6o] 



Concerning Addition 

Time and money were convertible terms 
with him, and he sought by every means 
in his power to build up a huge fortune. 

Reading was not for him. Books were 
apt to be idle thoughts, only fit for idle fel- 
lows, and he had no time to waste on non- 
sense. Pictures might make good invest- 
ments if a man happened to buy the right 
kind, but he didn't pretend to know a 
good one from a bad one, and so he never 
bought any. The companionship of his 
fellows was not congenial to him and he 
belonged to no clubs. A club, in his 
opinion, was a place where a man wasted 
time that might have been employed in 
making money and where idle fellows 
swapped idler stories. No, the office for 
him and his whole mind to the making of 
money. 

His brother went to Europe, to South 
America, to Asia, to Africa ; how he did it 
was a mystery, for he made very little 
[ I6i ] 



The Knack of It 



money. He seemed to know how to get 
a good deal of service for a small expendi- 
ture of silver, and he acted as if life were 
an enjoyable thing. 

Neither brother married, and after a 
time old age came upon each of them. 

Then the moneyed man retired from 
business, broken in health and with noth- 
ing to do but regret that he had not made 
more money while he was at it. 

But the " lazy " brother, who had worked 
his mind and his sensibilities for all they 
were worth his whole life long, was able to 
sit by himself, if need be, and have the full 
companionship of the many bright minds 
that he had known in life and in books, to 
bring before his mind's eye the many 
lovely pictures he had seen on canvas and 
in the landscape, to call up to recollection's 
ear the delightful harmonies that he had 
heard from the world's great orchestras, 
the beautiful melodies that had come from 

[162] 



Concerning Addition 

full-throated singers ; and if he had had 
none of these solaces, great reward would 
have been his in his ability to reach up to 
his book shelves and pick therefrom the 
fruit of a lifetime's gathering. 

The one, rich, old and unhappy ; the 
other, rich in associations, friends, and all 
those things that go to the making of a 
cultivated man — and the heart of a boy in 
him still. 

" Every little bit added to what you've 
got makes just a little bit more," and the 
wise brother had added a little bit of infor- 
mation to a little bit of amusement and a 
little bit of good-will and a little bit of 
helpfulness, and so when he was seventy 
he had an accumulation that sufficed him 
for the long twilight of a healthy old age, 
while his brother the money-getter 

It has just occurred to me that he, too, 
followed the advice, but it does not seem 
to have done him much good. Every lit- 

[163] 



The Knack of It 



tie bit (of money) added to what (money) 
you've got makes just a little bit more 
(money), but all the money in the world 
won't buy good-fellowship, real, sincere 
good-fellowship — I mean, if you haven't 
planted the seeds of friendliness in your 
youth ; and when you are seventy and 
have neglected books all your life you are 
not going to sit down and suddenly enjoy 
them. Nor will a rich man find that his 
bulging pocketbooks can buy him appre- 
ciation of the beautiful in pictures or of the 
gorgeous tone-colouring in symphonies, 
if he has neglected to begin his addition of 
one kind of cultivation to another kind in 
his boyhood and young manhood. 

Don't regard the money spent on a good 
play or a good concert as money thrown 
away. Don't regard the hour spent with 
a good friend as time thrown away. 
Don't regard the time spent on a captivat- 
ing romance or a well-developed novel or 
[164] 



Concerning Addition 

a cleverly written essay as time misspent. 
Don't regard the time spent in outdoor 
sports as wasted. 

I'm not advocating idleness or the neg- 
lect of duty. If a man is in business let 
him give his mind to his business. If I 
had given my mind to the business I was 
in when I was a young man I might to-day 
control the dry-goods market, but the 
trouble was I wouldn't read good advice 
like this I am handing out, and I hadn't 
horse-sense enough to know that I could 
never hope to advance without industry ; 
and every little bit of idleness, added to 
what I had, made just a litde bit more ; 
and when the pile was big enough my em- 
ployer noticed it and asked me if I would 
kindly make place for a friend of his, and 
I obligingly stepped down and out and 
lost my chance of being a dry-goods king 
that very day. 

Don't do as I did, but do as I advise. If 

[ 165 ] 



The Knack of It 



I spent my time in picture-galleries that 
should have been given to separating the 
moreens from the mohairs, or attended 
afternoon concerts when I should have 
been extricating the buntings from among 
the worsteds, I was adding a little bit of 
time that I didn't own to some more that I 
had already got (dishonestly), and while it 
made a little bit more it didn't better my 
character at all, and if I had stayed in the 
dry-goods business I fear to say what I 
might have become. 

Be sure that your time is your own, then 
spend it so as to accumulate treasure for 
your old age ; and if you die before you are 
old you will have already realized a good 
deal on your investment. 

Now let us sing together : ** Every little 
bit added to what you've got makes just 
a little bit more." 



[i66] 



XX 

On Lending 

IF you desire to know how poorly off 
you are, just notice what you say the 
next time some poor fellow comes and 
asks you for a loan of money to help him 
out of a tight place. 

But perhaps you remember what you 
said last time. 

"Awfully sorry, old man, but we're putting 
a steam-heating plant into the house, and 
you know how that costs. And we've got to 
paper the servant's room. And it does seem 
as if business was falling off every month. 
Hard times are upon us, and I believe this 
country is going to the dogs. Awfully 
sorry to disoblige, but you know how it is." 

Of course, ** old man " knows how it is, 
and he goes away feeling bitter because 
you won't accommodate him, totally for- 

[167] 



The Knack of It 



getting that a little while ago, when I was 
in a hole and went to him for a loan, he 
said : "By George 1 why didn't you come 
yesterday ? Paid a bill I needn't have 
paid, and now I really can't do a thing for 
you. Awfully sorry, old chap. Better 
luck next time." 

Why, I remember that when Janeway 
came to me last month and wanted to bor- 
row fifty dollars to pay his life insurance 
premium, I told him that I hadn't sold a 
story for two weeks (absolute truth), and 
that, much as I wanted, etc., etc., etc. 

Oh, we certainly do feel poor when the 
time to help one of our fellow sufferers 
comes along. 

But there's one thing about it. The 
more we have the poorer we feel, and some 
of those who really are poor will dip right 
into the bottom of their pockets and hand 
over everything to help, knowing how it is 
themselves. 

[168] 



On Lending 



I know one man who would make the 
best kind of millionaire imaginable, for, if 
any of his friends is about to undertake 
something calling for ready money, he is 
sure to say : "By the way, got plenty of 
money ? Because if you need any, I'll be 
glad," etc., etc. 

Popular man ? Well, yes, he is ; only I 
will say this for human nature — that he is 
not imposed upon as often as you might 
think. When a man is as ready as that to 
help a friend along, it would be a mean 
friend who would try to bleed him. 

But isn't it queer how the most of us 
will cling to our money ? Maybe we are 
bachelors, and have next to no call on our 
funds, and there is not a day passes that 
we could not give a young chap a start in 
business, or make the sledding easier for a 
few days, but we never think of doing a 
thing. 

We listen to a call for ten dollars, and 
[169] 



The Knack of It 



hand out the threadbare plea of the need 
of papering the basement or putting a 
carpet in the attic, and then in sheer ennui 
we go to the opera and have a supper after- 
wards, inviting a rich friend, and we blow 
in ten dollars — perhaps the very ten dol- 
lars that the poor devil wanted, although 
we have so many ten dollars it would be 
hard to tell which was which without 
marking them. 

Of course, a man has a right to do what 
he will with his money, and perhaps if any 
one of us was rich he would enjoy getting 
ten dollars' worth of Caruso's voice far bet- 
ter than he would enjoy helping a deserving 
man out of a hole to the extent of ten dollars; 
but just looking at it academically, it would 
seem that the best fun a man could have 
would be looking around for people who 
needed help, and helping them. 

Imagine being a millionaire and going 
around among the studios or the con- 
[170] 



On Lendi 



n 



g 



servatories and finding out this fellow with 
talent and that girl with a voice, and help- 
ing them to art educations, not asking 
that they return the money, but pledging 
them to pass the favour along when they 
themselves had succeeded. 

An endless chain of that sort, eh ? Fd 
like to come back here five hundred years 
after it was started just for the purpose of 
noting how much better the world was 
by virtue of these benefactions passed 
along. 

That's one good thing about human 
nature. If a man does a kindly thing, the 
fellow benefited never rests until he can go 
and do something for some one else. 

I fancy that the reason why it is so hard 
to borrow money when one gets into a tight 
place, is because one goes to people who 
have never been helped. Don't you know 
there are people who are worth a million 
or more, and who are proud of saying : 

[171] 



The Knack of It 



" I am under no obligations to any one. 
I'm entirely a self-made man. I made 
every dollar myself, and no man has a 
claim on a single one. If I give, it is be- 
cause I'm naturally generous, and want to 
help others." 

But if he never would accept help, why 
should he insult others by helping them ? 

It is to laugh. Fancy a man in this 
America of ours being independent. In- 
dependence may be our boast, but even 
your plutocrat depends upon the often 
underpaid efTorts of the man below. 

But if you go to the right man when 
you are in a hole — if you use good judg- 
ment and go to the poor man, and tell 
him what your prospects are, and how a 
little tiding over at the present time will 
enable you to succeed later on, he won't 
have a word to say about papering his 
cellar or buying a new automobile for his 
invalid son. He will say: "Sit right 

[172] 



On Trending 



where you are, old man, and I'll raise it 
inside of half an hour. I know a place 
where money grows." 

And he'll be back with it in the half-hour. 
I don't know where he gets it — whether 
he has a fat stocking that he takes good 
care of, or knows a lot of **easy marks" 
who are glad to unload when he gives 
them the password. One thing I do 
know, he is the boy that you hurry to pay 
back when success perches on your ban- 
ner once more, and nothing would make 
you happier than to hear that he was in a 
bad hole — just so that you could run in 
and offer him all you had. 



[173] 



XXI 

On Getting Paid in One s Own 
Coin 

LAUGH and the world laughs with 
you, quarrel and — you have the 
help of the world. 

Man is an imitative creature, and he is 
apt to do what he sees you do. Knowing 
this, you have yourself to blame if your 
merry outing sees its finish in a cell. 

I knew a man who, having received a 
little inheritance that enabled him to 
travel, set forth in blithe fashion, for all 
the world like a hero in a romantic novel. 

As he fared along the road, he'd greet 
those he met with a ** Good-morning ; it's 
a pretty day, isn't it ? " He was from the 
Southwest, where they have " pretty " days 
instead of " fine " ones — and his smile was 
reflected back from every face he passed. 

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Paid in One s Own Coin 

" It's the merriest kind of world," said 
he, and he was quite right. His suddenly- 
acquired means had rose-tinted the whole 
world. Every one was his friend, and he 
was on the best possible terms with every 
one. 

If he sojourned at a private house — and 
he found such hospitality everywhere — he 
was so hail-fellow-well-met, without being 
too familiar, that gruff men relaxed and 
women melted. 

" The world is better for having him," 
said they as he went on his way. 

"■ It surely is a merry world," said he. 
" This talk about trouble is very much ex- 
aggerated." 

He met Mexicans and Chinamen and 
Indians, and he found them all compan- 
ionable. He had the knack of getting un- 
der the skin with a pleasant remark just as 
some people do with a bit of sarcasm ; 
and, of course, once you get under the 

[175] 



The Knack of It 



skin, human nature is so much alike every- 
where that it would make a monotonous 
exhibit at a county fair if specimens of it 
from all over the world were laid side by 
side. 

One day he fell in with a dark-complex- 
ioned, weather-bronzed man in the foot- 
hills around Santa Barbara, and he found 
him a most companionable fellow. He 
was courteous, he had a sense of humour, 
had plenty of knowledge of men and 
things — even of botany and other bits of 
learning that schoolgirls absorb to-day and 
forget to-morrow ; and our friend said that 
he never heard any one say more poetical 
things about nature than this casual com- 
panion did, when the setting sun illu- 
mined the foot-hills and finally set in a 
sparkling sea of molten gold known on the 
map as the Pacific Ocean. 

(Laugh and the world laughs with you ; 
and yet, as it turned out, this particular 

[ 176 ] 



Paid in Ones Own Coin 

Santa Barbara member of the association of 
world inhabitants was a criminal leisurely 
and calmly getting away from justice.) 

Laugh and the world laughs with you ; 
and our friend had a laughing trip of five 
days, and at last came to Saturday. 

Now Saturday is really one of the nicest 
days in the week. Pay-day is apt to be 
on Saturday ; also it is the day on which 
one begins week-end visits. Saturday is a 
good day, a merry day, the merriest day 
in the whole seven. 

Just what happened to our friend Friday 
night he did not fully tell me. He may 
have had too merry a time with a party of 
campers with whom he spent the night. 
Something stronger than California wine 
flowed in that camp, and he said that they 
were a roystering lot, with little need of 
his smile to set them going. 

Whatever the cause, when the early 
birds began to sing among the redwoods, 
[177] 



The Knack of It 



they witnessed as cold and gray a dawn as 
ever comes the morning after to California ; 
and our friend woke with what is unpleas- 
antly known as a grouch. His smile was 
with the snows of yester-year, and as he went 
on his weary way, stiffly and sourly, he felt 
that this world was not quite the paradise it 
had been cracked up to be. There was a 
rift in somebody's lute, and the lute looked 
like his. And, what's more — he didn't like 
the songs the birds were singing. 

Not far on his way he met a man who 
was noted for his amiability, and had the 
stranger spoken first he might have waked 
a smile on our friend's gray features, but 
the man who had slept out spoke first. 

" I don't think much of your California 
weather," said he sourly and gratuitously. 

Now, the man addressed was a native 
son, and no native son, however amiable 
he may be, can stand any aspersions on 
the perfect, simply perfect California 

[178] 



Paid in One s Own Coin 

weather, so he said, in a tone tinctured 
with acidity : ** You couldn't match this 
day in the East?" 

" East ! " said our friend contemptu- 
ously. " Say, do I look like an Easterner ? 
I'm from Missouri myself, and down there 
we have pretty days, but if this is the kind 
of weather you advertise in the magazines, 
I'd like you to show me its superlativeness." 

This led to words on the part of the 
amiable man, and at last our smiling 
traveller and the amiable one came to 
blows, all under the arching dome of the 
California sky, with the little birds still 
singing. 

Laugh and the world laughs with you, 
quarrel — and you'll get what's coming to 
you. 

Speaking of merry hearts and fighting, I 
once knew a young clerk who was fond of 
fighting, and he thought this the best of 
all possible worlds because it was so easy 

[179] 



The Knack of It 



to pick a quarrel, and such fun to shake 
hands over it afterwards. He was not 
malicious at heart. He was simply high- 
spirited, and rejoiced in a scrap. 

If he celebrated a holiday by going to a 
picnic with his Maggie, and we asked him 
next morning if he'd had a good time, his 
answer would be very apt to be : *' I had 
a dandy time. Licked a feller that got 
saucy on the way down to Coney.*' 

" How did he get saucy ? " 

** Oh, he looked at Maggie, and I told 
him not to get gay, and he looked at her 
again, and I told him to mind his own 
business or I'd give him something to re- 
member me by, and he said he was mind- 
ing his own business, and I'd better mind 
mine, and then I sailed into him. He 
won't look at Maggie again before he's in- 
troduced." 

"And he'll never get introduced, will 
he?" 

[i8o] 



Paid in One s Own Coin 

" Oh, I introduced him after the scrap 
was over. He was a nice enough feller, 
only too free with his eye. He introduced 
me to his steady, and we all spent the 
afternoon together down at Coney." 

Jimmy was of Irish extraction, and Mag- 
gie was the same, and a fight was possibly 
a species of hospitality in their eyes, but it 
serves to show that whether you smile or 
quarrel the world does the same. 

But it's a good thing to start out a-laugh- 
ing of a Monday, keep laughing Tuesday, 
Wednesday and Thursday, be careful how 
you spend Friday night, and then make 
Saturday the merriest day of the week. 
You will have plenty of company, for the 
world loves a happy man. 



[I8i] 



#iUG '-'' 



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